Narcissism and self-esteem revisited: The relationships between the subscales of the NPI and explicit/implicit self-esteem

Abstract

The results of the previous research which tried to investigate links between self-esteem and narcissism in search of the source of narcissistic fragility are not consistent. The aim of the study was to contribute to the understanding of this complex relation by assessing relationships between the four facets of grandiose narcissism measured by the NPI and the two kinds of self-esteem i.e. explicit (ESE) and implicit (ISE), and by comparing the results with theoretical models. The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure, a more recent measure based on response latency, was used to assess ISE. The analysis confirms the reports on NPI heterogeneity. Different relationships between the particular facets of narcissism and ESE/ISE were observed. These differences indicate that composite measures of narcissism and ISE do not reflect the entire complexity of the phenomena. The results provide support for the two theoretical models i.e. the global marker model and the mask model.