Development and validation of the childhood narcissism scale

In this article, we describe the development and validation of a short (10 item) but comprehensive self-report measure of childhood narcissism. The Childhood Narcissism Scale (CNS) is a 1-dimensional measure of stable individual differences in childhood narcissism with strong internal consistency reliability (Studies 1–4). The CNS is virtually unrelated to conventional measures of self-esteem but is positively related to self-appraised superiority, social evaluative concern and self-esteem contingency, agentic interpersonal goals, and emotional extremity (Study 5). Furthermore, the CNS is negatively related to empathic concern and positively related to aggression following ego threat (Study 6). These results suggest that childhood narcissism has similar psychological and interpersonal correlates as adult narcissism. The CNS provides researchers a convenient tool for measuring narcissism in children and young adolescents with strong preliminary psychometric characteristics. “So may he himself love, and not gain the thing he loves!” According to the Greek myth, it was this prayer by a nymph that destined handsome Narcissus to fall in love with his own reflection in the water. In modern times, the trait of narcissism involves grandiose yet ultimately vulnerable views of self. More often than not, these inflated self-views are associated with an adversarial orientation toward others. Narcissism should not be confused with self-esteem (e.g., Brown & Zeigler-Hill, 2004)