The Attentional Bias Of Dominant And Recessive Narcissists

Narcissism is a normal personality trait that has an important impact on the cognition,emotion and behavior of individuals and exists widely in the general population.Studies have shown that the level of narcissism among young people is getting higher and higher in the millennial generation.Narcissism comes in two forms:overt and covert.Overt narcissists have a high level of mental health,but covert narcissists tend to pay attention to negative stimuli,feel inferior,oversensitive and prone to anxiety.In recent years,there have been a large number of empirical studies on the application of attention bias training in the treatment of mental illness in the field of psychology.Attention bias training can correct the attention bias of covert narcissists to negative information and alleviate their anxiety,depression and other negative emotions.However,few researchers at home and abroad use attention bias training to intervene the covert narcissists.People often come into contact with emotional faces in social life,but few researchers at home and abroad tend to use emotional faces as research materials.Therefore,this study based on previous theoretical and empirical research,using emotional faces as the research material,focus on overt and covert narcissistic undergraduate and graduate students groups,the subjects were screened out through questionnaires,through attention bias study(study 1)and attention bias training intervention study(study 2)to explore attention bias of overt and covert narcissists and the influence of attention bias training on implicit narcissists.In this study,the Chinese version of the narcissistic personality questionnaire revised by Wang Xiao Yan and the Chinese version of the hypersensitive narcissism scale were used to test college students and graduate students.391 valid questionnaires were collected through the Star Questionnaire and a total of 132 subjects were selected for two experimental studies.The first study aims to initially examine the emotional attention bias of both overt and covert narcissists.A total of 68 subjects,who were selected by questionnaire,were invited to participate in the study,using 2(subjects types:overt narcissism,recessive narcissistic)x 3(emotional types:positive,neutral,negative)x 2(clues location:effective cue position and invalid cue position)mixed experimental design,the dependent variables are attention oriented score and attention dissociation score.The results of repeated measures analysis of variance of attention orientation score and attention dissociation score indicate that the attention orientation scores and attention dissociation scores of the overt narcissists to the positive emotion faces were significantly higher than that of the covert narcissists,while the attention orientation scores and attention dissociation scores of the covert narcissists to the negative emotion faces were higher than those of the overt narcissists.This proves that overt narcissists have a significant attention bias to positive emotional faces,while covert narcissists have a significant attention bias to negative emotional faces.The second study aims to investigate the effect of attention bias training on attention bias and anxiety of covert narcissists.After the participants filled in the questionnaire,a total of 73 participants with covert narcissism were selected and randomly divided into the experimental group and the control group.Anxiety was measured by self-rating anxiety scale.The pre-test and post-test design of the experiment-control group was adopted,that is,2(measuring time:pre-test and post-test)3(emotional type:positive,neutral and negative)2(cue position:effective cue position and invalid cue position)mixed experimental design,and the dependent variables were attention orientation score,attention disengagement score and emotional assessment score.The overall process of the study is "grouping-pretest-attention bias training-posttest".The results of repeated measures analysis of variance of attention orientation score and attention dissociation score indicate that in the experimental group,the attention orientation scores and attention dissociation scores of negative emotion faces were significantly reduced after effective attention bias training and there was a significant increase in both the attention orientation score and the attention dissociation score for positive emotion face information,while the control group that received the nonsensical training showed no significant change.This proves that attentional bias training can correct the negative attentional bias of covert narcissists.The repeated measurement Anova of the emotional assessment showed that the anxiety of the experimental group was significantly reduced after the effective attention bias training.There was no significant change in the control group that received meaningless training.This proves that attention bias training can significantly alleviate the anxiety of covert narcissists.Through the above studies,the conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)Overt narcissists have a significant attention bias to positive emotional faces,while covert narcissists have a significant attention bias to negative emotional faces.(2)Attention bias intervention training can correct the negative attention bias of covert narcissists,which is manifested as significantly reducing the attention orientation level of covert narcissists to negative emotion faces,and enhancing the attention dissolving ability of covert narcissists to negative emotion faces.(3)Attention bias training can significantly alleviate the anxiety of covert narcissists.