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Narcissists are thought to display extreme affective reactions to positive and negative information about the self. Two experiments were conducted in which high- and low-narcissistic individuals, as defined by the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), completed a series of tasks in which they both succeeded and failed. After each task, participants made attributions for their performance and reported their moods. High-NPI participants responded with greater changes in anxiety, anger, and self-esteem. Low self-complexity was examined, but it neither mediated nor moderated affective responses. High-NPI participants tended to attribute initial success to ability, leading to more extreme anger responses and greater self-esteem reactivity to failure. A temporal sequence model linking self-attribution and emotion to narcissistic rage is discussed.

In this article, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) Task Force on Publication and Research Practices offers a brief statistical primer and recommendations for improving the dependability of research. Recommendations for research practice include (a) describing and addressing the choice of N (sample size) and consequent issues of statistical power, (b) reporting effect sizes and 95% confidence intervals (CIs), (c) avoiding "questionable research practices" that can inflate the probability of Type I error, (d) making available research materials necessary to replicate reported results, (e) adhering to SPSP's data sharing policy, (f) encouraging publication of high-quality replication studies, and (g) maintaining flexibility and openness to alternative standards and methods. Recommendations for educational practice include (a) encouraging a culture of "getting it right," (b) teaching and encouraging transparency of data reporting, (c) improving methodological instruction, and (d) modeling sound science and supporting junior researchers who seek to "get it right."

This study examined effects of threat to the sef on efforts to maintain a positive self-evaluation in individuals with varying levels of narcissism. Male students (N= 216) with varying levels of narcissism, as measured by the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, were given feedback that they had been either slightly or substantially outperformed on an ego-relevant task. Subjects completed personality ratings of the better-performing other believing that the other would or would not see the evaluation. According to Tesser's self-evaluation maintenance model, one way to reduce threat from a better-performing other is to derogate the other More narcissistic individuals reacted to such a threat to self by rating the other more negatively than less narcissistic individuals. However, in contrast to prediction, narcissists were somewhat less negative in public than in private. Discussion centers on the utility of translating a psychoanalytic construct into social cognitive processes.