Toward an Integrative Study of Narcissism

The expression of narcissism spans the con-tinuum from normal to pathological and has meaningful correlates in clinical and nonclinical populations. There is growing speculation that narcissism also contributes to major societal concerns (e.g., terrorism and corporate malfea-sance). Improving our understanding of the psy-chological, interpersonal, and social expres-sions of narcissism should be one of the most important areas in behavioral science research. Unfortunately, the study of narcissism is frag-mented and underpursued (see Miller and Campbell, pp. 180–191, this issue). Pathologi-cal narcissism (PN), primarily narcissistic per-sonality disorder (NPD; American Psychiatric Association, 1994), has been studied mainly through clinical case reports and psychody-namic theory (Ronningstam, 2005), whereas the study of trait narcissism has utilized more em-pirical methods. Miller and Campbell (this is-sue) contend that the current understanding of PN is speculative and empirically lacking. His proposed remedy is for psychiatric and clinical researchers to incorporate the strategies and tools used to study trait narcissism. Although research on PN should be more empirically based, the uncritical adoption of the trait narcis-sism paradigm seems ill advised. Rather, an integrative research perspective incorporating knowledge and methodologies across disci-plines would seem more promising. Trait Narcissism The trait narcissism literature is prolific but based almost exclusively on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI; Raskin & Hall, 1981). Miller and Campbell (this issue) ac-knowledge that the NPI has psychometric prob-lems and does not specifically endorse its use in clinical research. However, the NPI and trait narcissism are so interconnected that they have become practically synonymous (Cain, Pincus, & Ansell, 2008). Given their considerable over-lap, it is difficult to judge the relevance of the trait narcissism literature for clinical research without also considering the limitations of the NPI. The NPI was developed to measure narcis-sism in nonclinical samples. Despite years of application, the NPI factor structure remains unclear (Kubarych, Deary, & Austin, 2004), and NPI subscales typically lack adequate psy