Search

The purpose of this research is to better illuminate a vulnerable narcissist's daily emotional life, targeting the experiences of shame, anger, and emotion regulation. Participants completed self-report questionnaires before writing an essay on their adjustment to college. After being randomly assigned to receive either satisfactory or unsatisfactory feedback, participants rated the quality of their own essay performance, reported their current emotions, and completed extra process measures to assess what they were thinking during the study. Feedback which disconfirmed vulnerable narcissists' self-reported performance ratings led to greater emotionality. Furthermore, vulnerable narcissists' intention to regulate their emotions, specifically their attempts to disqualify the importance of interpersonal feedback, ultimately led to greater shame. Conceptual and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Two studies explored how and when people abandon commitment to threatened possible selves. First, we predicted that self-doubt, anxiety, and expectancy changes will mediate the effect of threats on possible selves. Specifically, the rising anxiety evoked by threats transforms initial doubt into the ultimate fall of expectancies supporting commitment to possible selves. Second, we predicted that this general process of downward self-revision would be more likely to occur when threats fully specify the meaning, or implications, of an undesired discrepancy (i.e., into the vivid prospect of an alternative undesired self as more likely than the desired self if the person continues to pursue the desired self). Results across both studies support the hypotheses. We close by discussing the conceptual and practical implications of the findings.

High- and low-social-anxiety individuals' reactions to evaluative feedback were investigated. Subjects made accuracy ratings, attributions, and affective responses to feedback on test performance and an evaluation by a psychologist. The results provide support for both self-consistency and self-esteem notions, albeit in separate response domains. Significant interactions between social anxiety and evaluation valence were uncovered on two measures of cognitive responses. Subjects high in social anxiety rated favorable feedback as less accurate, and favorable evaluators as less perceptive, than subjects low in social anxiety Results on the affective measures, however, revealed that high-social-anxiety subjects were less happy with unfavorable feedback than their low-social-anxiety counterparts. The results are discussed in terms of the self-concept of the socially anxious individual, the differential impact of subjective and objective feedback, and implications for clinical intervention.