Abstract
Previous evidence suggests that narcissistic people tend to visit social networking sites (SNS) frequently, but the emotions accompanying their engagement on such sites has not been a significant subject of study. Therefore, we examined the relationship between narcissism and the affective experience on SNS in two different samples. To do so, we not only examined narcissism as a whole but also distinguished between adaptive and maladaptive narcissism. Results of the two studies consistently showed that: (1) narcissism as a whole was not correlated with the SNS affective experience; (2) maladaptive narcissism was predictive of a worse affective experience on SNS; and (3) partly due to a positive correlation with self-esteem, adaptive narcissism was associated with a better SNS affective experience. In addition, these findings held with SNS activities considered in simultaneity. The present research extends our understanding of the relationship between narcissism and social networking as well as that between emotion and social networking.
Highlights
Nowadays, millions of people visit social networking sites (SNS) every day (CNNIC, 2017)
No correlation exists between the overall score of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) and SNS affective experience (Table 1)
The affective experience on SNS was positively related to adaptive narcissism, while negatively correlated with maladaptive narcissism (Table 2, Model 1)
Summary
Millions of people visit social networking sites (SNS) every day (CNNIC, 2017). Among active SNS users are narcissists (Gnambs and Appel, 2018). The term narcissism derives from Narcissus, a young man in Greek mythology who could only stare at his beautiful reflection in a pool. Narcissists in the modern age are far luckier than Narcissus. Owing to SNS, narcissists today can take and enhance their “selfie” images, and display them to numerous people anywhere, anytime. Empirical research has found that narcissists overall are more active on SNS than non-narcissists (for reviews see, Liu and Baumeister, 2016; Gnambs and Appel, 2018)
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