Narcissists Tend to Make Other People Feel Good as Well as themselves

Extant research suggests that grandiose narcissism is mostly linked with affiliative humor, which enhances the social attractiveness of the individual. However, the deeper look on narcissistic features provides the existence of its maladaptive outcomes as well; therefore in our research we take into account the differentiation on two distinct, yet related facets of grandiose narcissism: admiration and rivalry. The study was conducted in over 20 countries from all over the world. Respondents aged 18-35 were administered the measurement of grandiose narcissism and humor styles. In order to verify our hypotheses, at first, we tested the measurement invariance across cultures for both grandiose narcissism and humor, and secondly we tested the structural equation model in which overall sense of humor and separate humor styles are predicted by narcissistic admiration and rivalry. The expected results suggest that grandiose narcissism and humor styles are invariant across cultures and that the adaptive humor styles (affiliative and self-enhancing) are positively predicted by admiration, whereas negatively by rivalry. Moreover, we predict that rivalry positively predicted aggressive humor which is consistent with the theoretical account of this face of grandiose narcissism.