Narcissus' belief about his body: Aspects of narcissism, body image, and eating disorder symptoms

Piotr Szymczak; Daniel Talbot; Emanuela S Gritti; Peter K Jonason

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0293578

Narcissus' belief about his body: Aspects of narcissism, body image, and eating disorder symptoms

PLoS One. 2023 Nov 9;18(11):e0293578. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0293578. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Piotr Szymczak¹, Daniel Talbot^{2

3

4}, Emanuela S Gritti⁵, Peter K Jonason^{1

6}

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Psychology, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.
² Department of Psychiatry, Westmead Hospital, Westmead, Australia.
³ University of Sydney, Camperdown, Australia.
⁴ University of Notre Dame, Fremantle, Australia.
⁵ Department of Psychology, University of Milano Bicocca, Milan, Italy.
⁶ Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy.

Abstract

Objective: Narcissism may play a role in shaping body image concerns. Here we examined the relationships between narcissism (i.e., agentic extraversion, antagonism, narcissistic neuroticism, leadership/authority, exhibitionism/entitlement) and body image concerns and disturbances (i.e., drive for thinness, drive for muscularity, eating disorder symptoms, body mass index, current/desired fat, and current/desired muscularity).

Methods: Mechanical Turk workers from the USA (N = 430; 64% male) completed the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire, the Hypersensitive Narcissism Scale, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, the Drive for Muscularity Scale, the Drive for Thinness Scale, the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire-Short, and the Sex-Specific Somatomorphic Matrixes.

Results: All narcissistic factors were associated with a greater drive for thinness (except for leadership/authority) and for muscularity, more eating disorder symptoms, a greater desired body fat (except for leadership/authority), and a greater current muscularity. Greater agentic extraversion and exhibitionism/entitlement were associated with lower levels of current body fat, and greater antagonism was associated with a greater desired muscularity.

Discussion: Notably, individual differences in narcissism appeared to be important in understanding body image concerns, broadly speaking. We found that narcissism may be associated with body image concerns among both sexes differently, and especially that drive for thinness was more related to narcissism in men. Our results emphasize the importance of narcissism in formulating and treating body image-related disorders for both men and women. Ultimately, narcissistic features of personality may be risk factors for developing and perpetuating body image concerns, and therefore should be considered in assessment, formulation, diagnosis, and treatment of eating disorders.

Copyright: © 2023 Szymczak et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Body Image
Feeding and Eating Disorders*
Female
Humans
Male
Narcissism
Narcissus*
Thinness

Grants and funding

The first and the fourth author were fully and partially, respectively, funded by a grant from the National Science Centre of Poland (2019/35/B/HS6/00682). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.