A recent study published in Current Psychology suggests that how adults remember their parents treating them during childhood tends to predict their development of specific dark personality traits. The findings provide evidence that high levels of childhood indulgence associate with socially negative traits, while childhood praise links to more socially advantageous characteristics.
The Dark Triad is a psychological framework that groups together three socially difficult personality dimensions. These dimensions are psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. Psychopathy involves a lack of empathy, a tendency toward cruelty, and high impulsivity. Machiavellianism is characterized by a cynical worldview and a tendency to manipulate or exploit others for personal gain. Narcissism involves an inflated sense of self-importance, feelings of entitlement, and a deep need for admiration from others.
People often express these characteristics on a spectrum, meaning they are present to varying degrees in the general population rather than just in clinical settings. In many everyday situations, some features of these dark traits can actually provide social advantages. For instance, traits like superficial charm, social assertiveness, and the ability to stay calm under pressure often help people succeed in highly competitive environments. Because these traits are so common, psychological researchers want to know exactly how they develop.
Scientists have noticed that the building blocks of these traits often appear in early childhood. This observation suggests that a person’s early developmental environment plays a meaningful role in shaping their adult personality. Past studies looking at early life experiences have yielded mixed results regarding exactly how parenting shapes these dark traits. To understand this developmental process better, it is helpful to look beyond the broad categories of the Dark Triad.
Instead of treating each dimension as a single massive block, psychological frameworks often break them down into smaller, more specific traits. For example, the broad category of psychopathy can be divided into meanness, boldness, and a severe lack of impulse control. Narcissism can be separated into attention-seeking extraversion, defensive hostility, and emotional vulnerability. By breaking these dimensions down into multi-faceted traits, scientists can detect subtle differences in how specific parenting strategies relate to distinct human behaviors.
Jennifer Vonk, a distinguished professor of psychology at Oakland University, explained the motivation behind the research. “We have longstanding interests in the origins of dark personality traits,” Vonk told PsyPost. “Relatively recent three-factor models of the dark triad dimensions have revealed some alignment between the fundamental facets of each dimension, which provided the opportunity to take a more nuanced approach to studying the associations between particular parenting strategies and specific traits.”
The authors designed this study to explore how specific childhood experiences correlate with these precise, lower-level traits. They focused heavily on how parental praise, indulgence, and an emphasis on social status might shape personality. Praise refers to reinforcing a child’s inherent worth and telling them they are special. Indulgence involves overvaluing the child, failing to set limits, and giving them almost everything they want. Status involves teaching a child that acquiring success, fame, and prestige is essential for survival in a competitive world.
Vonk noted that looking at specific tools helped drive the research design. “In addition, the newer measure of parental use of praise and shame seemed particularly relevant to the study of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy so we were excited to explore those associations,” Vonk said.
To examine these connections, the researchers recruited 1,025 undergraduate students from the Midwestern United States who received course credit for participating. After removing participants who failed basic attention checks or had incomplete survey data, the final sample consisted of 720 students. This group included 571 women, 133 men, and 16 non-binary individuals. The participants had an average age of 20.14 years, with ages ranging from 17 to 52.
The racial and ethnic makeup of the sample was 73.5 percent White, 13.1 percent Black, 6.7 percent Asian, and 5.4 percent Hispanic. Another 6.0 percent of participants identified as other ethnicities, while some opted not to share this information. The students completed a series of online questionnaires designed to measure their current personality traits and their memories of how their primary caregivers treated them during childhood.
To measure perceived parenting strategies, the scientists used a tool called the Praise Indulgence and Status Parenting Scale. This questionnaire asked participants to rate statements about how much their caregivers praised their abilities, gave them whatever they asked for, or pushed them to pursue stardom.
The participants also completed a modified version of the Parental Bonding Instrument. This survey measured levels of parental care, the denial of psychological autonomy, and the encouragement of behavioral freedom. Denying psychological autonomy involves overprotective behaviors, such as a parent invading a child’s privacy or restricting their independence.
The researchers measured the specific traits of the Dark Triad using three separate psychological tests. To assess psychopathy, they used a survey that measures emotional meanness, stress-resistant boldness, and a failure to regulate emotions. For Machiavellianism, they used an inventory that captures selfish hostility, ambitious drive, and thoughtful deliberation. To measure narcissism, the authors used a questionnaire that evaluates defensive antagonism, a desire to be noticed, and negative emotional reactivity to failure.
Through statistical analysis, the researchers found a consistent pattern connecting perceived parenting styles to specific adult personality outcomes. High levels of recalled parental indulgence tended to predict negative personality features across all three Dark Triad domains. For example, participants who remembered highly indulgent parents showed higher levels of narcissistic antagonism, psychopathic meanness, and psychopathic disinhibition. Disinhibition refers to acting on impulses without thinking about the consequences.
At the same time, high parental indulgence was linked to lower levels of relatively positive traits. These individuals reported lower Machiavellian ambition, less forward planning, and reduced narcissistic extraversion. This combination suggests that giving a child everything they want might foster hostility and impulsivity rather than healthy confidence and self-regulation.
Parental praise showed the exact opposite pattern in the data. High levels of childhood praise were negatively associated with hostile and impulsive traits across the board. Instead, praise was linked to more socially beneficial characteristics, such as a healthy sense of agency and social confidence. This indicates that reinforcing a child’s worth tends to support adaptive social functioning without creating a sense of cruel entitlement.
Vonk highlighted the practical implications of these opposing results. “The fact that high indulgence and low praise seem to predict higher levels of pathological traits and lower levels of the more positive traits points to the importance of providing children with affirming feedback without engaging in over-indulgence,” Vonk said.
The study also revealed that an emphasis on social status relates to a mix of positive and negative personality features. Participants whose parents pushed them toward prestige exhibited higher levels of both adaptive traits, like boldness, and maladaptive traits, like manipulative hostility. Denying a child psychological autonomy was positively associated with hostility, poor impulse control, and negative emotional reactions to stress.
However, some of the findings regarding emotional vulnerability in narcissism were less pronounced than anticipated. “Not overly, although I did think we would find stronger associations with neurotic narcissism than we did,” Vonk said when asked if anything in the study surprised her.
Interestingly, basic parental care did not show a strong unique association with most dark traits once the other parenting strategies were factored into the mathematical models. Care was only uniquely associated with lower levels of impulsive disinhibition. This suggests that the specific ways parents offer praise or set limits might play a larger role in dark personality development than general warmth alone in these specific models.
Vonk offered some context for this finding, explaining that care and praise often overlap statistically. “I was maybe a little surprised that parental warmth/care wasn’t a stronger predictor of child traits, but I think this was just an artifact of its association with praise, which may be capturing similar variance,” Vonk said. “I would not want readers to assume that parental warmth is unimportant in fostering positive traits in children.”
“The key takeaway is the importance of using multi-dimensional models of these personality dimensions, particularly when exploring early etiological factors,” Vonk said, referring to the causes and origins of these traits. “There are some relatively adaptive aspects of these dark dimensions that may be rooted in distinct childhood experiences that differ from those that give rise to the more pathological aspects of the same dimensions.”
“Studying parenting strategies as overarching styles and higher order personality dimensions may obscure important patterns in particular parental behaviors and child traits,” Vonk added. “These opposing associations also highlight the need to consider distinct traits separately to avoid missing important patterns.”
While these findings provide helpful context for personality development, they do come with certain limitations. Because the study relied on correlational data gathered at a single point in time, it is impossible to prove that specific parenting strategies directly cause dark personality traits. People who already possess highly hostile or impulsive traits might simply remember their childhoods in a biased or inaccurate way compared to their peers.
Additionally, it is important to remember the nature of the people surveyed. “I would also like to caution readers to recognize that our sample was not a clinical sample so individuals high in, for example, psychopathic meanness were not ‘psychopaths,'” Vonk said. “They were individuals that scored relatively high on this trait compared to the rest of the sample. It is quite possible that different patterns would emerge in a clinical sample.”
The demographic makeup of the sample also limits how broadly these findings can be applied to the general public. The participants were predominantly female, mostly White, and entirely made up of American college students. “I think it is also important to note that our participant sample were likely not experiencing some of the harshest conditions of early life experiences because we sampled college students, so we likely only captured a small degree of variance in our predictor variables,” Vonk said.
Future studies could explore how different parenting strategies interact with one another in real time over the course of childhood. The researchers also hope to expand their focus to encompass a broader range of childhood environments.
Vonk shared her vision for the next steps in this line of inquiry. “I am interested in exploring more negative aspects of early childhood experiences linked to adversity and trauma, but I am also especially interested in how attachment styles between children and their caregivers might mitigate or exacerbate some of the potentially negative effects of early adverse experiences,” Vonk said.
The study, “Praise the light, indulge the dark: Parenting strategies and dark personality traits,” was authored by Jennifer Vonk, Virgil Zeigler-Hill, and Nyla Griffin.
