Vulnerable Narcissism and First-Person Singular Pronoun Use

Who talks about themselves most frequently? Recent research has explored the top correlates of self-focused language use. Depression and negative emotionality tend to appear as key positive correlates. Surprisingly, narcissism—which is largely known for its trait of self-centeredness—is not a major correlate of self-focused language use. Studies demonstrating this null effect have only measured grandiose narcissism, while entirely neglecting vulnerable narcissism. By using a survey methodology with carefully-selected trait inventories and a language task, the purpose of this study is to fill the gap in the literature—to see whether vulnerable narcissism accounts for talking about oneself, above and beyond the common correlates of depression and negative emotionality. Our findings from a large number of college students (valid N = 471) indicated that vulnerable narcissism is significantly positively correlated with first-person singular pronoun use; however, it does not predict the outcome above and beyond traditional predictors. Along with establishing this novel correlation, these findings have clear practical implications which will be detailed further in this paper

Inferring Grandiose Narcissism From Text: LIWC Versus Machine Learning

People have long used language to infer associates’ personality. In quantitative research, the relationship is often analyzed by looking at correlations between a psychological construct and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC)—a program that tabulates word frequencies. We compare LIWC to a machine learning (ML) language model on the task of predicting grandiose narcissism (valid N = 471).We use the ML model discussed in Cutler and Kulis and formulate it as an extension of LIWC. With a strict validation scheme, the LIWC prediction was not more accurate than chance. The ML representation did moderately better (R2 = .043). This indicates that the ML model was able to preserve personality information where LIWC failed to do so, suggesting that precautions are warranted for social-personality research that relies solely on LIWC