ArticleScientific reports2021
Narcissistic personality traits and prefrontal brain structure.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 31 citations in OpenAlex.
- Common and distinct morphometric correlates of the Dark Triad traits: machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy in a healthy male sample.Journal of neural transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996) · 2026Article
- Bidirectional predictive modeling of narcissists' social exclusion and their hostile interpretations: a deep learning-based exploration of cognitive mechanisms.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Narcissistic and Antisocial Personality Traits Are Both Encoded in the Triple Network: Connectomics Evidence.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Beyond good and evil : The pursuit of philosophical and scientific truth in a time of moral ambiguity.EMBO reports · 2025Article
- The Dark Tetrad: analysis of profiles and relationship with the Big Five personality factors.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Narcissistic Personality Disorder through psycholinguistic analysis and neuroscientific correlates.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- The Neural Correlates of Narcissism: Is There a Connection with Desire for Fame and Celebrity Worship?Brain sciences · 2023Review
- Structural connectivity of grandiose versus vulnerable narcissism as models of social dominance and subordination.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Dark triad personality traits are associated with decreased grey matter volumes in 'social brain' structures.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Self-Enhancement and the Medial Prefrontal Cortex: The Convergence of Clinical and Experimental Findings.Brain sciences · 2022Review
- Impact of Early-Commenced and Continued Sports Training on the Precuneus in Older Athletes.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Narcissistic traits have been linked to structural and functional brain networks, including the insular cortex, however, with inconsistent findings. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that subclinical narcissism is associated with variations in regional brain volumes in insular and prefrontal areas. We studied 103 clinically healthy subjects, who were assessed for narcissistic traits using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI, 40-item version) and received high-resolution structural magnetic resonance imaging. Voxel-based morphometry was used to analyse MRI scans and multiple regression models were used for statistical analysis, with threshold-free cluster enhancement (TFCE). We found significant (p < 0.05, family-wise error FWE corrected) positive correlations of NPI scores with grey matter in multiple prefrontal cortical areas (including the medial and ventromedial, anterior/rostral dorsolateral prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices, subgenual and mid-anterior cingulate cortices, insula, and bilateral caudate nuclei). We did not observe reliable links to particular facets of NPI-narcissism. Our findings provide novel evidence for an association of narcissistic traits with variations in prefrontal and insular brain structure, which also overlap with previous functional studies of narcissism-related phenotypes including self-enhancement and social dominance. However, further studies are needed to clarify differential associations to entitlement vs. vulnerable facets of narcissism.
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