Pathological narcissism and aggression: the mediating effect of difficulties in the regulation of negative emotions

The explanation of violent behaviors often involved the role of pathological personality especially narcissistic personality traits. Moreover, emotion regulation deficits are commonly thought to be a central feature in violent offenders. Recently, some evidences suggest that difficulties in the regulation of shame might account for aggressions. However, there is still a lack of studies exploring the complex pattern of relationships between pathological narcissism, emotional dysregulation and coping shame strategies in samples of violent offenders. We administered to a sample of violent offenders (n = 182) and a sample of community participants (n = 203) the Aggression Questionnaire (AQ, Buss & Perry, 1992), the Pathological Narcissism Inventory (PNI, Pincus et al., 2009), the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS, Gratz & Roemer, 2004) and the Compass of Shame Scale (CoSS, Elison et al., 2006). We found that offenders showed higher levels of aggression, pathological narcissism, emotion regulation difficulties and dysfunctional strategies of shame regulation compared to community participants. Multiple regression analyses indicated that some specific subscales of the PNI, DERS and CoSS positively and significantly predicted AQ scores. Finally, both dimensions of pathological narcissism predict aggression through shame coping strategies. In contrast, only the relationship between grandiose narcissism and aggression was mediated by emotion dysregulation levels. Our results support conclusion drawn elsewhere toward the role played by pathological narcissism, emotion dysregulation and shame in the explanation of aggression. Moreover, the understanding of the role played by the regulation of negative emotions in aggression should distinguish the nature of emotional trigger.