Those manipulations have psychological effects, at least in the short term. If you tell participants they performed poorly on a test, they might respond defensively by deciding that the test was not very valid. If you tell them they were not picked for a group, they might decide the group was not that important anyway. Or they might become more willing to act aggressively, with aggression operationalized in laboratory studies as something like determining the intensity of an unpleasant noise blast delivered to another participant.

So it is possible to create some reasonable approximation of ego threat in the laboratory. And we know from laboratory research that short-term ego threats lead to a variety of responses. People might internalize the experience emotionally (e.g., I feel sad or dejected), externalize it behaviorally (e.g., I am angry and will aggress against you), minimize its importance (e.g., I don’t care because this doesn’t matter), or psychologically defend against the information (e.g., this test was bogus and you are a liar).

However, our knowledge is limited because ethical and practical constraints limit how severe an ego threat researchers can create in a psychology laboratory. You can tell somebody that they failed a creativity test. You cannot take an art student who has just won a major national prize, secretly arrange to have the prize taken away from her in the interest of science, and then sit there measuring what happens psychologically. That would be very wrong.

As a result, there was much less research—at least back in the day—on what responses to truly major ego threats might look like.

I had an idea in graduate school that the ego might respond to major threats somewhat like a physical system. If the body receives a sufficiently serious injury, there can be an immediate period where the normal pain is interrupted. Maybe something analogous happens psychologically following a sufficiently powerful blow to the self. I called this ego-shock.

I had no idea whether this was a good idea, and I certainly did not understand human physiology very well. I just knew from surfing that if you got banged off a reef, you would paddle yourself someplace safe and then look down to see how badly you had been cut up. Sometimes you could not really feel how lacerated you were for a little while. This numbness would set in before the pain. I have a scar between my eyes that came from getting struck by the back fin of my thruster when surfing Windansea in grad school. After I got tagged, I paddled over to a guy and asked how I looked. He looked like he was going to hurl and I headed to the ER for stitches.

So, the ego-shock idea came from these kinds of experiences. I was not thinking about physiological shock in the true medical sense so much as that strange immediate period after a serious blow when the pain and awareness system seems temporarily muted.

I remember talking to Mark Leary about the idea in Chapel Hill, and he said it made some sense. But Mark was also a pretty cool guy and generally willing to humor enthusiastic grad students.

When I started my postdoc, Roy Baumeister was doing interesting work using narrative methods. In this kind of research, you ask people to describe important events from their lives, often using an internal comparison or what we would call a within-subjects design. For example, Roy did work on the psychology of breaking up in which people wrote narratives about romantic rejection and relationship dissolution from different perspectives.

This kind of narrative work is preliminary and is often designed to generate hypotheses rather than provide the final word on a phenomenon. But it can get at intense psychological experiences that are not as available in the lab. So, I used essentially the same narrative approach to study ego-shock. We asked participants:

“Please tell a true story from your life in which you received a relatively major [or minor] threat to your self-worth. Please be as thorough as possible, include incidents leading up to the experience, emotions and thoughts you had during the experience, and consequences the experience had on your behavior.”

Participants wrote about both a major and a minor threat to their self-worth. They then responded to a series of seven-point questions about those experiences. This allowed us to see both what people considered major and minor ego threats and whether major threats produced the psychological state I was thinking about as ego-shock.

To measure ego-shock, we created an index, which is technically a little different from developing a full psychological scale. The index averaged four experiences immediately following the threat: freezing up or being unable to act, feeling removed or distant from yourself, feeling that the world seemed distant or strange, and feeling emotionally numb.

Again, this was preliminary research. I am not claiming it was the greatest science ever conducted. But the results were really interesting.

When you look at what people actually described as major and minor threats, the categories were fairly similar overall. There were academic failures, social and peer rejection, romantic rejection, athletic failures, other personal failures, and personal transgressions. Academic failures were significantly more common among minor threats, while personal transgressions showed a tendency to appear more often among major threats. But a lot depended on degree. A social rejection might be something relatively minor, like not getting picked for a team, or something much more consequential, like rejection by a serious romantic partner. Romantic rejection was numerically more common among major threats, although that difference was not statistically significant.

Interestingly, major and minor threats were not really different in terms of how expected they were. There also was not much difference in whether people deliberately tried to suppress their thoughts afterward.

Where they differed was in ego-shock.

As you can see in the figure below, major threats produced substantially higher levels on the ego-shock index. Participants were more likely to freeze, feel distant from themselves, experience the world as distant or strange, and feel emotionally numb. Major threats were also much more emotionally powerful experiences (which is basically a validity check).

Where I think the story gets really interesting is what happened afterward.

Imagine a major physical injury. You can recover from it and remain somewhat impaired. But you can also imagine cases where someone gets injured, becomes completely dialed in during rehabilitation, and eventually emerges in better physical condition than before the injury. The injury itself was obviously bad, but the process of responding to it produced a positive long-term change.

We found something similar in participants’ retrospective accounts of major ego threats.

A substantial number of participants reported that the major threat ultimately changed how they saw themselves for the worse. But a substantial minority reported the opposite: a psychologically painful experience was later described as leading to positive change in the self. Another smaller group reported no meaningful or only temporary change.

These were retrospective narrative reports, not longitudinal demonstrations that personality had objectively changed, so the results should be interpreted with that in mind. Still, it seems that major ego-shocks can create opportunities for positive change. That does not mean the shock itself necessarily causes growth, but it can apparently become part of a process through which people revise how they see themselves.

As much as I liked the idea of ego-shock, it never really caught on as a major psychological construct. I suspect there are several reasons. There are already a lot of constructs that overlap with it, including dissociation, acute stress responses, and, somewhat, posttraumatic growth. It is also extremely difficult to study properly because you cannot ethically create truly severe ego threats in a laboratory.

But the research changed the way I thought about ego threat, particularly in my younger academic days.

The first thing it opened my eyes to was that everybody has a cross to bear. It is easy when you are standing in front of a classroom to look at a group of students and think they all seem pretty happy and well adjusted. They are in college. Most of them have apparently had a pretty good run.

But I guarantee you that almost everyone in that room has experienced serious personal setbacks and challenges. Obviously some are much worse than others, but almost everybody gets hit hard somewhere along the way. That realization gave me a lot more empathy for the average person and the ordinary difficulty of making your way through life.

It also made me appreciate psychological processes like dissociation a little more. Depersonalization and derealization were aspects of the self I thought I might eventually study but never really did. We did not formally measure dissociation in the ego-shock study, but some of the experiences participants reported—feeling detached from themselves or experiencing the world as strange or unreal—have a clear family resemblance to depersonalization and derealization. You do not tend to see as much of that in ordinary laboratory manipulations.

Finally, your ego inevitably gets knocked about a bit if you put yourself out there in the world. It is relatively easy to live in a box and protect yourself from rejection and failure. But if you want to grow, you are going to take some ego blows.

What is encouraging about this research, and about related research on things like posttraumatic growth, is that these experiences can be extraordinarily painful in the short term while still sometimes becoming part of something valuable in the long term. Sometimes you bounce back stronger. Sometimes you become a little wiser or more realistic. Sometimes a major setback protects you from an even worse setback that you would have encountered later. A lot of times in life, we dodge a bullet without realizing it at first. We think a particular relationship is perfect, or a particular job is perfect, and then it falls apart. At the time it feels terrible. Years later, we look back and think, man, that was a blessing in disguise.

Life is complicated and often painful. But the pain we experience can sometimes, if we are willing to work with it, lead to something better farther on down the line.

Links to my work: Homepage; Peterson Academy; Books on Amazon

My New Peterson Academy course: The Psychology of Wealth

My PA Intro to Psych history lecture now on YouTube

Some citations

Campbell, W. K., Baumeister, R. F., Dhavale, D., & Tice, D. M. (2003). Responding to major threats to self-esteem: A preliminary, narrative study of ego-shock. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 22, 79–96.

Campbell, W. K., Brunell, A. B., & Foster, J. D. (2004). Sitting here in limbo: Ego shock and posttraumatic growth. Psychological Inquiry, 15, 22–26.

Baumeister, R. F., Wotman, S. R., & Stillwell, A. M. (1993). Unrequited love: On heartbreak, anger, guilt, scriptlessness, and humiliation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 377–394.

Disclaimer:

The information in this post is provided for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing contained herein constitutes medical, psychological, psychiatric, financial, or professional advice of any kind. This content is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any condition, nor should it be relied upon as a substitute for consultation with qualified medical, mental health, financial, or other licensed professionals. Always seek the advice of an appropriately credentialed professional regarding any specific questions or concerns you may have.

For example, two individuals with the same total narcissism score might have very different narcissistic profiles, with one being higher in assertive extraversion but lower in antagonism and another being higher in antagonism but a little lower in assertive extraversion.

Latent class analysis—and, with continuous indicators, what is often called latent profile analysis—takes a different approach from the usual correlational work in personality psychology. Instead of focusing primarily on relationships between variables across the whole sample, it asks whether individuals can be grouped into different classes based on their particular combinations and levels of important variables.

Researchers have used this latent class approach with narcissism a few different times. The first paper on this that I recall reading was by Wetzel and colleagues in 2016. They looked at narcissism using the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire, developed by German psychologist Mitja Back and colleagues. This model breaks grandiose narcissism into a more agentic, self-promoting, extraverted side called admiration and a more antagonistic, defensive, disagreeable, and combative side called rivalry.

When they ran a latent class analysis, they found four profiles of narcissism across their samples. One group was generally low on both admiration and rivalry. A second, moderate group was characterized primarily by admiration. A third, moderate group was elevated on both admiration and rivalry. And a fourth, high-narcissism group was high on both.

Some of these results are just an outcome of the statistical procedure. As Mitja once quipped to me, it’s like salsa: you often end up with mild, medium, and hot as your outcome classes. But in this case, there was also an interesting finding in the middle. There was a more admiration-focused, agentic form of narcissism. These individuals had more of the confident, extraverted, self-promoting side of narcissism without as much antagonistic rivalry. They also looked relatively better on measures such as self-esteem and interpersonal functioning. The moderate group that combined admiration and rivalry, in contrast, showed lower self-esteem and more problematic interpersonal characteristics.

A recent study by Johnson and colleagues addressed this question with a somewhat greater focus on pathological personality. They built their profiles using the NPI, PNI, and selected traits from the PID-5, which is a dimensional model of maladaptive personality traits closely related to the Big Five and contains 25 facets.

The actual variables used to create the classes included NPI Adaptive and NPI Maladaptive narcissism, PNI Grandiosity and PNI Vulnerability, and seven PID-5 facets: Grandiosity, Attention-Seeking, Anxiousness, Emotional Lability, Separation Insecurity, Perseveration, and Suspiciousness. In Study 2, they also included the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale and my old Psychological Entitlement Scale, or PES, as external measures to help validate the classes after they had been identified.

This was a somewhat different approach from using the NARQ because it included a lot more vulnerability and negative affectivity in the model of narcissism. The PNI has a Grandiosity scale, but its grandiosity construct contains somewhat different psychological content from the more classic grandiose narcissism captured by the NPI. Its Vulnerability scale, meanwhile, contains a lot of contingent self-esteem, insecurity, hiding the self, devaluation, and entitlement rage.

They ended up with four classes or profiles. At the low end was a nonpathological group, which made up about 24% of the sample. There was also an anxious group, about 29% of the sample, that was high on internalizing traits and elevated on both dimensions of the PNI but quite low on the NPI. Then there was what the authors called an adaptive narcissism group, about 28% of the sample, which was relatively high on the NPI and narcissistic traits but relatively low on vulnerability and negative affectivity. (I used AI to make the figure below based on Table 4 in the paper.)

Finally, there was what they called a pathological narcissism group. This group was high on essentially all of the narcissism indicators: NPI narcissism, PNI Grandiosity and Vulnerability, PID-5 Grandiosity and Attention-Seeking, as well as negative-affectivity traits such as anxiousness, emotional lability, separation insecurity, suspiciousness, and perseveration. That group actually made up about 20% of the sample, which surprised me a bit.

When they compared these classes on self-esteem and entitlement, you could see the distinction pretty clearly. The adaptive narcissism group had relatively high self-esteem, essentially the same as the nonpathological group. The pathological narcissism group had substantially lower self-esteem and looked more like the anxious group. Entitlement showed a different pattern: it was elevated in the adaptive narcissism group but was highest in the pathological narcissism group.

Across these two studies, then, it does seem that we can statistically extract different profiles of narcissism that are meaningful. It also looks as though the most extreme forms of narcissism combine multiple elements. In the NARQ study, the highest-narcissism group combines the more assertive, agentic side of narcissism with antagonistic rivalry. In the newer study using the NPI, PNI, and PID-5, the highest-narcissism group combines grandiosity and entitlement with a lot more vulnerability, negative affectivity, and defensiveness.

And across both studies, it looks like there is an agentic, self-promotional, high-self-esteem class of narcissism that resembles the classic extraverted form of grandiose narcissism, and a more elevated narcissistic profile associated with lower self-esteem and higher negative affectivity that looks relatively maladaptive.

That said, I don’t particularly like loaded terminology such as pathological or adaptive. The terms do make some sense—certainly a high-extraversion, high-self-esteem personality profile is likely to feel better and function more effectively in many settings than one marked by high antagonism, high entitlement, and high neuroticism.

BUT you can have an “adaptive” narcissistic profile and still do a whole bunch of damage as a relationship partner, a leader in an organization, or even an influencer or role model. Feeling good about yourself does not necessarily mean that your personality is good for everyone around you.

Rather than adaptive, the profile that keeps emerging in the middle of these studies might be better described as agentic narcissism. It is loaded with extraversion, drive, confidence, leadership, self-promotion, and grandiosity, with relatively less antagonism and neuroticism. Calling it agentic tells us what is actually distinctive about the profile without making the additional claim that it is necessarily psychologically or socially adaptive.

Likewise, rather than calling the most elevated group pathological narcissism, I might call it high-severity narcissism. This group is not simply vulnerable or neurotic. It has elevated levels of essentially every narcissism-related dimension included in the model: grandiosity, attention-seeking, maladaptive narcissism, vulnerability, entitlement, and negative affectivity. Across both studies, then, you seem to recover a more agentic, extraverted form of narcissism, while at the high-severity end you start getting more of everything.

The other important take-home from this work is that there are clearly levels or degrees to narcissism. Some people’s narcissistic profiles are simply more elevated than others. So when we talk about narcissism, it is useful to think not just about the particular flavor—whether it is more agentic and confident, more antagonistic, or more vulnerable and self-protective—but also about the overall level of narcissism.

I enjoy seeing this kind of modeling being done, and hopefully people will keep doing this work with different markers, different measures, and different samples.

Links to my work: Homepage; Peterson Academy; Books on Amazon

My New Peterson Academy course: The Psychology of Wealth

My PA Intro to Psych history lecture now on YouTube

Some citations

Back, M. D., Küfner, A. C. P., Dufner, M., Gerlach, T. M., Rauthmann, J. F., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2013). Narcissistic admiration and rivalry: Disentangling the bright and dark sides of narcissism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(6), 1013–1037.

Johnson, T., Schiafo, M., & Anderson, J. L. (2026). Investigating trait profiles of narcissism using the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5). Journal of Personality Disorders, 40(4), 329–353.

Pincus, A. L., Ansell, E. B., Pimentel, C. A., Cain, N. M., Wright, A. G. C., & Levy, K. N. (2009). Initial construction and validation of the Pathological Narcissism Inventory. Psychological Assessment, 21(3), 365–379.

Wetzel, E., Leckelt, M., Gerlach, T. M., & Back, M. D. (2016). Distinguishing subgroups of narcissists with latent class analysis. European Journal of Personality, 30(4), 374–389.

Disclaimer:
The information in this post is provided for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing contained herein constitutes medical, psychological, psychiatric, financial, or professional advice of any kind. This content is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any condition, nor should it be relied upon as a substitute for consultation with qualified medical, mental health, financial, or other licensed professionals. Always seek the advice of an appropriately credentialed professional regarding any specific questions or concerns you may have.

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