14 DAY TRIAL // According to the conclusions of a new investigation conducted by University of Michigan (U-M) psychologists, and published in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, it would appear that being narcissistic makes men more likely to become sick.
This personality trait is apparently somehow linked to bad health, says study coauthor Sara Korath. She says that physical health disadvantages are added to the psychological costs that these males have to pay when it comes to their relationships with the opposite gender.
Past studies conducted by the same U-M team have revealed that narcissism is becoming increasingly common in the general population of the United States, and that men are the most likely to exhibit it.
Some of the most common “symptoms” med display include an over-inflated sense of self-importance, which is unjustified in real life, a tendency to overestimate one's uniqueness, as well as exhibiting a sense of grandiosity without too many achievements to back that up.
Together with colleagues from the University of Virginia, the U-M scientists analyzed a sample of 106 volunteer graduate students, in a bit to correlate narcissism and gender, on one hand, with cortisol levels in the saliva, on the other.
Cortisol is informally called the stress hormone, and its levels rise when people are subjected to stressful or damaging experiences. Each of the participants had their cortisol levels measured two separate times, so that the team could establish a baseline.
“Even though narcissists have grandiose self-perceptions, they also have fragile views of themselves, and often resort to defensive strategies like aggression when their sense of superiority is threatened,” UV investigator David Reinhard explains.
“These kinds of coping strategies are linked with increased cardiovascular reactivity to stress and higher blood pressure, so it makes sense that higher levels of maladaptive narcissism would contribute to highly reactive stress response systems and chronically elevated levels of stress,” he adds.
A significant implication of the new work is that narcissism may also play an important role in determining people's responses to daily interactions and routines. At the same time, the team learned that cortisol production could be boosted in males without being exposed to a stressing factor.
“Given societal definitions of masculinity that overlap with narcissism – for example, the belief that men should be arrogant and dominant – men who endorse stereotypically male sex roles and who are also high in narcissism may feel especially stressed,” Konrath concludes.