RESEARCH ARTICLE
Narcissism and Defending Self-Esteem. An Exploratory Study based on Self-characterizations
Guido Veronese1, *, Rossella Procaccia2, Giovanni M. Ruggiero3, Sandra Sassaroli3, Marco Castiglioni1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2015Volume: 8
First Page: 38
Last Page: 43
Publisher ID: TOPSYJ-8-38
DOI: 10.2174/1874350101508010038
Article History:
Received Date: 25/10/2014Revision Received Date: 30/01/2015
Acceptance Date: 02/02/2015
Electronic publication date: 27/2/2015
Collection year: 2015
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The present qualitative study aims at investigating the role of socio-relational variables in the construction of threats to self-esteem, grandiosity, and relaxation in a non-clinical sample of 35 young university students. The work provides fresh experimental evidence of the structural analogy observed in clinical settings between constructions of threat to self-esteem and grandiose fantasies. We hypothesize that the relational dimension would be more strongly present than either biological or psychological dimensions.The results show that descriptions of relaxation differ significantly from their characterizations of the other two domains. Specifically we found greater continuity and narrative connection between the aspects of threat and grandiosity, while the domain of relaxation showed a more “isolated” pattern.