Metacognitive impairment is considered to be a hallmark crucial to explaining in interpersonal difficulties of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). Current studies suggests important things that NPD lack accurate metacognitions about emotional sta...
Metacognitive impairment is considered to be a hallmark crucial to explaining in interpersonal difficulties of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). Current studies suggests important things that NPD lack accurate metacognitions about emotional states but empirical evidence is insufficient. The aim of this study is to investigate differential metacognition of emotion recognition in young adults with pathological narcissism as compared to control subjects by using relative and global measures, and to investigate relations among relative meta-accuracy and performance.
A pathological narcissism group (n=36) and control group (n=36) was selected among 495 undergraduate students based on scores on the Pathological Narcissism Inventory(PNI) and Symptom Check List 90-Revision(SCL-90-R). Relative meta-accuracy is calculated at the gamma correlation, means of within participant correlations between confidence ratings and correct vs. incorrect responses on the emotion recognition task. And global meta-accuracy is calculated at the Pearson correlation between questionnaire(Interpersonal Reactivity Index, Mind-Reading Belief Scale) response and proportion correct on the emotion recognition task.
In comparison with the control group, the pathological narcissism group showed reduced metacognition of emotion recognition in the relative meta-accuracy while no significant differences were indicated in the global meta-accuracy. In the retrospective condition, the control group rose the relative meta-accuracy compared to the prospective condition, but the pathological narcissism group does not indicate the difference of the relative meta-accuracy according to the condition. In comparison with the control group, the pathological narcissism group showed low mean proportion correct on the Emotional Expression Multimorph Task, while no significant differences were indicated in confidence judgments, and in the high level condition, the mean confidence were high compare with the control group. In the meanwhile, people who were better at the emotion recognition task also tended to be more accurate in their relative metacognitive assessments.
As a result of the study, individuals with pathological narcissism revealed the high self-confidence even when the emotional awareness was difficult and the prudence was lacking when the test was accompanied. This kind of traits seems to have an effect on the damage to their metacognitive impairments. The implications and limitations of this study were discussed along with the suggestions for future research.