A person talks about being excluded from a group. Those who listen to her reply that, perhaps, they asked for it. A nice dose of tact, in short. Faced with this scene, the brains of people with strong narcissistic traits seem to react differently than those of those with few of them. This is shown by Finnish research that observed what happens in our heads when we witness the embarrassment and humiliation of others.
The study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex was conducted by a group of researchers led by Aalto University, Finland, on 58 adults undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The findings suggest that some narcissistic traits may influence how we interpret other people’s social difficulties, helping to explain why those with these characteristics may have more difficulty showing empathy.
We are talking above all about the so-called grandiose narcissism, associated with high self-esteem, the desire for admiration and the tendency to feel superior to others. Traits that can be present to varying degrees even in people without a personality disorder.
What happens in the brain when someone is humiliated
The researchers started from a questionnaire filled out by almost a thousand people, subsequently selecting 28 adults with high scores on narcissistic traits and another 30 with low scores. During the MRI, the volunteers watched some videos in which an actor recounted personal experiences, from being admired to being excluded by others. After each story came a comment from another person, sometimes positive, other times decidedly unpleasant. Some questioned whether the protagonist really deserved the admiration he received. In other cases, he suggested that the exclusion had been a consequence of his own behaviour.
Participants were only asked to observe. No invitation to empathize, no request to feel compassion. The researchers wanted to understand how the brain spontaneously processed a fairly common social situation, without suggesting which emotional reaction was most appropriate.
During the negative comments the most interesting differences appeared. In people with few narcissistic traits, some brain areas showed relatively similar patterns of activity across participants. In the group with more marked traits, however, this similarity was significantly lower.
The differences mainly concerned two regions: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex, both involved, among other functions, in interpreting social situations and understanding other people’s points of view. Simply put, when faced with the same embarrassing scene, the brains of people with many narcissistic traits seemed to process what was happening in more different ways from one individual to another.
Because narcissism can make it more difficult to understand others
Empathy encompasses several capabilities. We can recognize that someone is suffering, understand the reason for their discomfort and in turn feel an emotional response. These abilities do not always go together. Finnish research has identified differences especially in regions associated with so-called cognitive empathy, or the ability to understand another person’s thoughts, emotions and perspectives.
The questionnaires filled out by the participants also showed a difference: those with more narcissistic traits reported on average a lower tendency to consider the point of view of others, less empathic concern and less personal discomfort when faced with emotionally difficult situations. In the anterior insula, a region also involved in emotional processing, the observed differences did not reach statistical significance.
Matias Piispanen, a researcher involved in the study, explained in a communication from Aalto University that people with many narcissistic traits might pay attention to different aspects of the same interaction, or interpret what is happening differently.
A possibility that helps to understand some difficulties in daily relationships. In fact, when someone talks about a painful experience, the empathetic response also depends on how we interpret their story. If we attribute responsibility for the discomfort to the person experiencing it, we may react very differently than someone who immediately recognizes their vulnerability. And in certain relationships, even a request for understanding can turn into an argument about who is right or wrong.
Are those with narcissistic traits really incapable of feeling empathy?
The study adds an interesting element to the knowledge of narcissism, but requires an important distinction. The 58 participants were selected based on personality traits measured through questionnaires. The research, therefore, did not concern people with a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder.
Furthermore, less similarity in brain activity does not automatically mean an absence of emotion or an inability to feel compassion. The same researchers studied grandiose narcissism, while vulnerable narcissism, which is more associated with insecurity and sensitivity to judgment, was not analyzed separately.
The result, however, suggests something precise: the more marked narcissistic traits seem to be associated with a less uniform way of processing the social difficulties of others, especially in the brain regions involved in understanding the perspectives of others.
Until now, many experiments on empathy have focused on photographs of faces and emotional expressions. This time the researchers chose situations closer to everyday life, with personal stories, judgments and that discomfort you feel when someone is put in difficulty in front of others.
There remains one step still to be studied: how these brain differences translate into concrete behaviors. During the experiment, in fact, the volunteers only had to watch. No one asked them to respond to the humiliated person or try to console them. And there may be some difference between recognizing someone’s discomfort and deciding to take care of it.
