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Shyness and modesty are similar constructs, but to date no study has investigated their relationship empirically, hence the goal of this study was to examine this relationship and how shyness and modesty are related to the Big Five model of personality. We administered a set of self-report measures of shyness, modesty and Big Five personality traits to 727 adults in Poland. The results conformed our expectations, revealing that shyness and modesty are positively correlated traits. Moreover, in regard to Big Five personality traits, both of them were negatively related to extraversion and positively to neuroticism, but only modesty was positively related to agreeableness. Our findings are discussed in light of previous research and theory.

The main purpose of this paper was to examine shyness in teenagers from two perspectives: in terms of its relations with basic personality traits and in terms of its influence on the processes that occur in the social networks of high school students. First, we found that shyness was negatively predicted by extraversion and positively by neuroticism. Second, using exponential random graph models we demonstrated that shyness across network effects was similar to reversed extraversion (introversion): Both negatively predicted the number of outgoing relations, whereas they did not affect the number of incoming relations. We discuss the issue of locating shyness in the space of personality traits, supporting the relevance of ascribing it to introversion.

The present study examines the question of whether certain humor styles predict self-esteem. Men and women in 15 countries (NTOTAL = 4701) completed self-report measures assessing self-esteem and the four humor styles of affiliative, aggressive, self-defeating, and self-enhancing. Each of the country samples had self-esteem averages at or above the midpoint of the scale, but did vary. The samples from Colombia and Serbia had the highest self-esteem values and Russia had the lowest. For all of the country samples, with the exception of Russia, the multiple regression results demonstrated that a greater level of the self-enhancing humor style positively predicted higher self-esteem scores. As the self-enhancing humor style involves improving one’s mood with humor, the results suggest that for the majority of the participants, self-enhancing humor styles also help to increase self-esteem. The results are discussed both within countries and across the samples. In particular, the unique finding that not a self-enhancing humor style but an aggressive humor style predicts self-esteem in the Russian sample is discussed. The chapter ends with a discussion of how humor styles correlate with mental health indicators and how the understanding of humor style profiles are related to well-being across countries adds to the global understanding of individual differences.

Previous research has shown that individuals high in narcissism mistrust others, yet little is known about narcissism's relation to trust. In the current study (N = 727), we aim to close this gap in the literature by examining the relationship between facets of trust (i.e., cognitive bias in the evaluation of others and personal trustworthiness) and facets of grandiose narcissism (i.e., agentic, antagonistic, and communal). We strive to answer the question whether narcissistic individuals believe that others are reliable, honest, and benevolent (how they perceive others) and whether they present themselves as trusting of others (how they perceive themselves). We posit and show that agentic narcissism is not related to any of the studied trust facets, suggesting that the concept of trust is not relevant to their self-image. In contrast, antagonistic narcissism is negatively related to perceiving others and oneself as trustful, and communal narcissism is positively related to these trust facets, purportedly due to communal self-enhancement. We discuss our findings of the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept as well as to the Agency-Communion model of grandiose narcissism.

Extant empirical research, despite some theoretical descriptions, has consistently demonstrated that the Dark Triad is not related to general mental ability. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between the Dark Triad of personality (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) and fluid intelligence. A sample of 128 Polish high school students (Mage = 16.89 years; SDage = 0.31; 28.1% of the sample were boys) completed the Polish translation of the Short Dark Triad and the Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices. Hypotheses were tested using a structural equation model, which fit the data well. As predicted, we found that of the three Dark Triad traits, only Machiavellianism was significantly predicted by fluid intelligence. Our findings are discussed in light of previous research and theory.

Existing research suggests that narcissism is moderately associated with authentic pride and weakly associated with hubristic pride. In the current paper, we investigate whether the differentiation of the two faces of narcissism (i.e., admiration and rivalry), provides an alternate account of the relationships between these variables. We hypothesised that such differentiation would result in a contradictory pattern of relations with authentic pride, whilst both narcissistic strategies would be positively correlated with hubristic pride. The study was conducted on an adult sample using the Authentic and Hubristic Pride Scale and Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire. The hypotheses were tested using a structural equation model, which was well fitted to the data. The results supported our expectations regarding the mutual suppression effect of the two faces of narcissism on the relation with authentic pride as well as the common direction of the relations with the hubristic pride.

The current study examines the psychometric properties of the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale (R-UCLA): structural validity, reliability and external validity. We conducted a study on a sample of 247 high school students, all aged 16. In order to verify the hypotheses, scales measuring feelings of loneliness, shyness and self-esteem were administered. As a result of confirmatory factor analyses, it was demonstrated that the structure of the R-UCLA is three-factorial, the factors being as follows: (1) intimate others, referring to the feeling of exclusion; (2) social others, referring to the lack of closeness and support in relationships; and (3) belonging and affiliation, referring to the lack of community bonds – all of which are reliable in their measurement, as is the total score of the R-UCLA. Moreover, we demonstrated that the feeling of loneliness is positively related to shyness and negatively related to self-esteem. The obtained results support using the R-UCLA among Polish adolescents.

OBJECTIVE We investigated how Dark Triad traits influence the development and maintenance of social relations. METHOD Participants completed the Short Dark Triad questionnaire and a measure of social relations at three time points: at the beginning of their first year in high school, 3 months later, and at the end of their first year. We investigated whether the Dark Triad traits are stable over time using Multilevel Modeling (N = 265; 59.6% girls), and how Dark Triad traits predict incoming and outgoing agentic and communal relations using Temporal Exponential Random Graph Models (N = 192; 60.4% girls). RESULTS Overall, the Dark Triad traits were stable over a one-year period. Narcissism did not predict an increase in communal and agentic relations in the short-term, but predicted slightly less incoming communal and more agentic relations in the long-term. In the short-term, Machiavellianism predicted a small increase while psychopathy predicted a small decrease in the incoming agentic and communal relations. In the long-term, however, neither Machiavellianism nor psychopathy was a significant predictor of any incoming relations. CONCLUSIONS Our results shed new light on the dynamics of making and maintaining social relations through the prism of the Dark Triad traits.

Responses to a measure of the four humor styles of affiliative, aggressive, self-enhancing, and self-defeating from the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ; Martin et al. Journal of Research in Personality, 37(1), 48–75, 2003) were collected from individuals (N = 8361) in 28 countries encompassing 21 different languages. The purpose of this global collaboration was to examine both differences and similarities of humor styles across nations at the descriptive level. Across the countries, typically the highest scores were for the affiliative humor style. When each humor style was examined, some country samples demonstrated differences in mean scores. For example, the samples from Hungary, Indonesia, South Africa, and Serbia had high self-enhancing scores and Japan scored the lowest. In contrast to mean differences, almost all of the countries demonstrated positive inter-scale correlations, similar sex differences, and similar correlations with age, suggesting more similarities than differences. As discussed, some of the samples had low internal consistency values and poorly fitting factor structures for the humor style scales, suggesting that those results should be interpreted with caution. © 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. National Foundation for Science and Technology Development, NAFOSTED Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation: 0101/DIA/2017/46 National Foundation for Science and Technology Development, NAFOSTED 501.01-2016.02

The Benign and Malicious Envy Scale is a promising self-report measure forming a counterpoint to the unidimensional approach to the assessment of dispositional envy. The goals of the present study were to examine the reliability, structure, and measurement equivalence of the Benign and Malicious Envy Scale across four independent groups from the United States, Germany, Russia, and Poland. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that the structure of the Benign and Malicious Envy Scale is two-dimensional and its measurement is reliable. Moreover, multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, supplemented by alignment optimization, revealed that the scale is invariant by country across all factors regardless of whether a linguistic distinction between the two envy types in the respective language exists. The results speak to the current debate about whether envy should be conceptualized as unitary or as an emotion that occurs in two distinct forms, supporting the latter view. Additionally, country-level differences in envy point to cultural differences which merit further research.

The current study examines the psychometric properties of the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale: structural validity, reliability and external validity. We conducted a study on a sample of 247 high school students, all aged 16. In order to verify hypotheses, scales measuring feeling of loneliness, shyness and self-esteem were administered. As a result of confirmatory factor analyses, it has been demonstrated that the structure of R-UCLA is three-factorial, the factors presents as follows: (1) intimate others, referring to the feeling of exclusion; (2) social others, referring to the lack of closeness and support in relationships; and (3) belonging and affiliation, referring to the lack of community bonds—all of which are reliable in their measurement as well as the total score of R-UCLA. Moreover, we demonstrated that the feeling of loneliness is positively related with shyness and negatively related with self-esteem. The obtained results support using the R-UCLA among Polish adolescents.

The aim of the current study is to prepare the Polish adaptation of the Revised Cheek and Buss Shyness Scale and to analyze relations between shyness, loneliness and personality traits. The study was conducted via the Internet, and a total of N = 314 adults participated and completed a set of self-report measures. Via comparisons of several confirmatory factor analysis models we demonstrated that the structure of the Polish adaptation of the scale is unidimensional. Consistent with research hypotheses, shyness was mostly correlated with loneliness and introversion; moreover, shyness was strongly negatively related to the personality metatrait of Plasticity and weakly but also negatively with the metatrait of Stability. In addition, individuals not engaged in romantic relationships scored significantly higher in shyness and loneliness, and lower in extraversion, openness, and Plasticity than individuals engaged in unformalized relationships. The results support the conclusion that shyness is a personality trait that significantly affects behavior by limiting the possibilities for adapting to changing environmental conditions.

This study addresses the question of whether adolescents or adults are more shy. On the one hand, adolescents spend most of their days functioning as part of a social group (school class), which fosters socialisation processes. However, on the other, in the face of new experiences, shyness may intensify as a result of the development of maladaptive reactions or excessive adjustment to social conventions. Two studies were conducted on different age samples: 314 adults aged 18–35 and 247 high school students, aged 16. In order to verify the hypotheses, the Revised Cheek and Buss Shyness Scale (RCBS) was administered. As a result of confirmatory factor analyses, it has been demonstrated that: (1) the structure of shyness among adults and adolescents, as measured by the RCBS scale, could be either interpreted as unifactorial or three-factorial; and (2) there is partial scalar measurement invariance for both the unifactorial and the three-factor models. The comparison of the average latent mean scores suggests that adults are more shy than adolescents, regardless whether the total score or specific factors were compared.

The relation between shyness and creativity has not been fully elucidated. The aim of present study was to examine if shy individuals express their creativity in different ways, as indexed by the relation between shyness and open-mindedness and its three facets: intellectual curiosity, aesthetic sensitivity, and creative imagination. We analyzed two separate structural equation models: first treating overall open-mindedness as a predictor of shyness, and the second in which we examined the three separate facets of open-mindedness (i.e., intellectual curiosity, aesthetic sensitivity, and creative imagination). Young adults (N = 727, Mage = 22.19 years) self-reported their levels of shyness and the three facets of open-mindedness. Results revealed that although shyness was unrelated to the broader construct of open-mindedness, the differentiation of the open-mindedness facets resulted in a good model fit to the data. Specifically, shyness was negatively associated with creative imagination, but positively associated with aesthetic sensitivity. Our findings illustrate the importance of examining different components of creativity, as these seem to be differentially associated with personality dimensions such as shyness. Our findings also have theoretical implications for understanding how shy individuals may express their creativity.

Grandiose and vulnerable narcissism seem to be uncorrelated in empirical studies, yet they share at least some theoretical similarities. In the current study, we examine the relation between grandiose (conceptualized as admiration and rivalry) and vulnerable narcissism in the context of the Big Five personality traits and metatraits, self-esteem, and their nomological network. To this end, participants (N = 314) filled in a set of self-report measures via an online survey. Rivalry was positively linked with both admiration and vulnerable narcissism. We replicated the relations of admiration and rivalry with personality traits and metatraits—as well as extended existing knowledge by providing support for the theory that vulnerable narcissism is simultaneously negatively related to the Stability and Plasticity. Higher scores on vulnerable narcissism and rivalry predicted having fragile self-esteem, whereas high scores on admiration predicted having optimal self-esteem. The assumed relations with the nomological network were confirmed, i.e., vulnerable narcissism and admiration demonstrated a contradictory pattern of relation to shyness and loneliness, whilst rivalry predicted low empathy. Our results suggest that the rivalry is between vulnerable narcissism and admiration, which supports its localization in the self-importance dimension of the narcissism spectrum model. It was concluded that whereas admiration and rivalry represent the bright and dark face of narcissism, vulnerable narcissism represents its blue face.

A recent re-operationalisation of grandiose narcissism has resulted in the distinction of two narcissistic strategies based on the cognitive, affective-motivational, and behavioural dynamics: admiration (assertive self-enhancement) and rivalry (antagonistic self-protection). The Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire (NARQ) was developed to assess this model with two higher-order dimensions. However, cross-validations of the NARQ have not been extensively conducted across diverse population groups and languages. This study aimed to test the internal and external validity (through the relation with envy and self-esteem), reliability, and cross-cultural equivalence of the Spanish version of the NARQ. The psychometric properties were evaluated in a Spanish sample (N = 310), and cross-cultural equivalence was tested in participants from Chile (N = 234) and Colombia (N = 256). The results supported the reliability and validity of the Spanish NARQ, as well as the cross-cultural equivalence across Spanish-speaking countries. In addition, we discuss obtained differences across Spanish, Chilean, and Colombian sample within two narcissistic strategies. The work of Maria M. Kwiatkowska is supportedby the research program for young scientists and PhDstudents funded by the Cardinal Stefan Wyszy´nskiUniversity in Warsaw, Poland (project number:UmoBMF-14/18). The work of R. Rogoza was sup-ported by National Science Centre, Poland (projectnumber 2015/19/N/HS6/00685).