Narcissistic personality disorder and self-esteem: An examination of differential relations with self-report and laboratory-based aggression

A controversy exists regarding the strength and replicability of relations between self-related constructs of self-esteem and narcissism in relation to aggression. Methodological issues have been posited to be responsible for these inconsistent results including an over-reliance on self-report measures and the use of dissimilar measures of aggression. In the current study, we examined the relations among Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), self-esteem and aggression in two samples. Both self-report and interview ratings of NPD were correlated with both laboratory-based and self-reported aggression. Alternatively, self-esteem manifested primarily nonsignificant relations with aggression, except when controlling for the variance shared with NPD. The current results add to the extant literature suggesting that narcissism may be the more powerful correlate of aggressive behavior.