Chad E. Lakey

Mindfulness as a Means of Reducing Aggressive Behavior: Dispositional and Situational Evidence

Recent research and theory suggest that mindfulness, or enhanced attention and awareness in the present moment [Brown and Ryan, 2003], may be linked to lower levels of ego-involvement and, as a result, may have implications for lowering hostility and aggressive behavior. Accordingly, we conducted two studies to examine the potential aggression-mitigating role of mindfulness. In Study 1, we found that dispositional mindfulness correlated negatively with self-reported aggressiveness and hostile attribution bias. In Study 2, participants made mindful before receiving social rejection feedback displayed less-aggressive behavior than did rejected participants not made mindful. Discussion centers on potential mechanisms by which mindfulness operates to reduce aggressive behavior.

Do Narcissists Dislike Themselves “Deep Down Inside”?:

Narcissism is a personality trait associated with an inflated, grandiose self-concept and a lack of intimacy in interpersonal relationships. A popular assumption is that narcissists’ positive explicit (conscious) self-views mask implicit (nonconscious) self-loathing. This belief is typically traced to psychodynamic theory, especially that of Kohut (1966; Morrison, 1983). Empirically, this view predicts that narcissists will reveal negative self-views when these are measured with unobtrusive instruments—such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998)—that record people’s automatic, uncontrolled responses. Using the IAT, however, researchers found no simple relation between narcissism and implicit selfesteem (rs 5 .13 and .03; Jordan, Spencer, Zanna, HoshinoBrowne, & Correll, 2003; Zeigler-Hill, 2006). According to another line of thought, narcissists’ explicit selfviews are not uniformly positive; rather, narcissism is associated with positive self-views in agentic domains (e.g., status, intelligence), but not in communal domains (e.g., kindness, morality). Evidence for this idea comes from both explicit trait ratings, which show an association between narcissism and positive selfviews only on agentic traits (Campbell, Rudich, & Sedikides, 2002), and from analyses showing that narcissism is particularly strongly associated with self-esteem measures that capture dominance (Brown & Zeigler-Hill, 2004). Bradlee and Emmons (1992) and Paulhus and Williams (2002) have also reported personality data supporting this distinction. As narcissists do not evaluate themselves uniformly positively across all dimensions—and the self-esteem IAT measures the strength of cognitive associations between the self and an evaluative dimension—the lack of correlation between narcissism and implicit self-esteem might reflect the words used in the IAT. Specifically, IATs employing more agentic words may correlate positively with narcissism, whereas those using more communal words may correlate negatively or not at all with narcissism. Indeed, this pattern is seen in narcissists’ implicit responses on the Thematic Apperception Test. On this test, narcissism correlates positively with nPower and negatively with nIntimacy and nAffiliation (Carroll, 1987). Researchers often use IAT words that activate respondents’ communal self-views more than their agentic ones. For example, the IAT words used by Jordan et al. (2003; friend, gift, happy, holiday, joy, love, party, smile, sunshine, warmth, agony, cockroach, death, disaster, disease, evil, garbage, pain, stink, and vomit) and by Zeigler-Hill (2006; happy, joy, paradise, pleasure, smile, sunshine, agony, death, grief, pain, sickness, and tragedy) include several communal terms and few agentic terms. Twentyfour pilot respondents rated both word lists along agentic and communal dimensions. Both lists conveyed significantly more communion than agency, t(23)s > 4.50, preps > .997, which might explain the weak associations these researchers observed between narcissism and IAT scores. We tested our logic that narcissism correlates positively with implicit agency and negatively or not at all with implicit communion in two studies. Using the IAT words from Jordan et al. (2003), we tested the link between narcissism and implicit selfesteem in a sample of undergraduates. Next, we created separate IATs to measure agentic and communal implicit self-views and tested their associations with narcissism.

Examining the Relations Among Narcissism, Impulsivity, and Self‐Defeating Behaviors

A recent meta-analysis (S. Vazire & D. C. Funder, 2006) suggested that narcissism and impulsivity are related and that impulsivity partially accounts for the relation between narcissism and self-defeating behaviors (SDB). This research examines these hypotheses in two studies and tests a competing hypothesis that Extraversion and Agreeableness account for this relation. In Study 1, we examined the relations among narcissism, impulsivity, and aggression. Both narcissism and impulsivity predicted aggression, but impulsivity did not mediate the narcissism-aggression relation. In Study 2, narcissism was related to a measure of SDB and manifested divergent relations with a range of impulsivity traits from three measures. None of the impulsivity models accounted for the narcissism-SDB relation, although there were unique mediating paths for traits related to sensation and fun seeking. The domains of Extraversion and low Agreeableness successfully mediated the entire narcissism-SDB relation. We address the discrepancy between the current and meta-analytic findings.

Within-Person Relationships Among Daily Self-Esteem, Need Satisfaction, and Authenticity

This study examined the within-person relationships among daily self-esteem, felt authenticity (i.e., the operation of ones “true self”), and satisfaction of psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We also included measures of affect to control for the variance these constructs might share with affect. Over a 2-week period, 116 participants responded daily to measures of these variables. Multilevel random-coefficients modeling revealed that authenticity, autonomy, competence, and relatedness were all positively and significantly related to daily reports of self-esteem, even when we controlled for the contributions of pleasant and unpleasant affect. We discuss the roles of authenticity and psychological needs in daily feelings of self-worth.

Exploring the Relations Among Executive Functions, Fluid Intelligence, and Personality

Executive functions (EFs) are important for goal-directed behavior and have been linked with a number of important constructs like intelligence. The current study examined the link between EFs and ...

Examining DSM-IV criteria for pathological gambling: psychometric properties and evidence from cognitive biases.

We examined the DSM-IV criteria for pathological gambling as assessed with the DSM-IV-based Diagnostic Interview for Gambling Severity (DIGS; Winters, Specker, & Stinchfield, 2002). We first analyzed the psychometric properties of the DIGS, and then assessed the extent to which performance on two judgment and decision-making tasks, the Georgia Gambling Task (Goodie, 2003) and the Iowa Gambling Task (Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994), related to higher reports of gambling pathology. In a sample of frequent gamblers, we found strong psychometric support for the DSM-IV conception of pathological gambling as measured by the DIGS, predictive relationships between DIGS scores and all cognitive performance measures, and significant differences in performance measures between individuals with and without pathological gambling. Analyses using suggested revisions to the pathological gambling threshold (Stinchfield, 2003) revealed that individuals meeting four of the DSM-IV criteria aligned significantly more with pathological gamblers than with non-pathological gamblers, supporting the suggested change in the cutoff score from five to four symptoms. Discussion focuses on the validity of the DSM-IV criteria as assessed by the DIGS and the role of cognitive biases in pathological gambling.

Lottery Participation as a Marker of and Contributor to Gambling-related Problems in College Students

We examined the role of lottery participation in contributing to gambling-related problems, using a sample of 351 college students who self-identified as frequent gamblers, including a sub-sample of 133 frequent lottery gamblers. Participants completed the DSM-IV based Diagnostic Interview for Gambling Severity and two cognitive tasks, the Georgia Gambling Task (GGT) and the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Among all individuals, lottery participation predicted gambling-related problems, but this was non-significant among frequent lottery gamblers. Gambling problems were related to number of frequent gambling modalities, but were lessened if one of the modalities was lottery participation and did not relate to the performance measures on the GGT or IGT. We conclude that lottery participation is a marker for gambling-related problems, but that it contributes to gambling problems in only a secondary way and only in the presence of other frequent gambling activity in this population.