When watching someone else endure harsh, embarrassing criticism, people with low levels of narcissism tend to show brain activity that rises and falls in step with one another in regions involved in taking another person’s perspective. A new neuroimaging study published in Cerebral Cortex indicates that this shared brain response is weaker among individuals with high grandiose narcissism. The findings suggest that narcissistic traits are linked to more variable, less coordinated neural processing when witnessing social threats directed at other people.
Narcissism is a personality trait marked by an excessive preoccupation with oneself and a reliance on social interactions to boost one’s own self-image. Psychologists distinguish between vulnerable narcissism, which involves insecurity and a strong need for approval, and grandiose narcissism, which is defined by feelings of superiority, entitlement, and a drive for social status and admiration. Both forms are associated with difficulties in empathy, a concept that encompasses both affective empathy, the capacity to share or feel another person’s emotions, and cognitive empathy, the ability to intellectually understand what someone else is thinking or feeling.
Whether highly narcissistic people lack the ability to understand others or simply lack the motivation to care has been a central question in personality research. In a 2020 meta-analysis of more than 32,000 people, individuals high in grandiose narcissism reported lower levels of both affective and cognitive empathy on questionnaires, yet they did not perform measurably worse than less narcissistic peers on behavioral tests that required understanding another person’s thoughts and feelings. On those tests, the shortfall appeared only in affective empathy. The authors of the new study read this pattern as a sign that grandiose narcissists can take another person’s perspective but may lack the motivation to do so.
At the same time, physiological and brain-imaging studies indicate that grandiose narcissists are acutely sensitive when their own social standing is challenged. For example, a 2015 brain-imaging study found that when people were left out of a virtual ball-tossing game, those with higher narcissism scores showed heightened activity in brain networks that process social pain and distress. Similarly, a 2023 physiological experiment by three of the same authors showed that individuals high in grandiose narcissism displayed amplified activity in facial muscles linked to anger and frustration when receiving negative evaluation, even though they did not report feeling more upset on questionnaires.
When emotional distress happens to someone else, however, the neural picture shifts. In a 2024 neuroimaging study in which participants were instructed to empathize with videos of people recounting personal losses or threats, individuals high in grandiose narcissism showed muted activity in emotion-related brain regions during moments of compassion. Yet everyday social life rarely comes with explicit instructions to empathize, and it frequently involves witnessing third parties evaluate or criticize someone else.
In everyday interactions, people constantly manage what sociologist Erving Goffman called “face,” the positive social image of competence or trustworthiness that a person claims when talking with others. A “face threat” occurs when someone’s projected self-image is challenged or discredited, and Goffman argued that such moments embarrass not only the person whose image is threatened but also the bystanders who witness it.
To explore how narcissistic traits relate to responses in these moments, study lead author Matias Piispanen and his colleagues conducted the new research as part of the Facing Narcissism project, a collaboration between Aalto University and the University of Helsinki. Piispanen is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering at Aalto University and the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki.
“Individuals with strong narcissistic traits tend to place great importance on maintaining a positive self-image and are sensitive to negative feedback,” Piispanen told PsyPost. “We wanted to understand how they respond when witnessing another person’s self-image being threatened.”
“Previous research on narcissism and empathy has often relied on relatively simple stimuli, such as pictures of emotional facial expressions, or explicitly instructed participants to empathize,” he explained. “Instead, we had participants watch another person receiving negative feedback on their personal stories in a more complex, naturalistic setting, without explicitly asking them to empathize. This allowed us to examine how narcissistic traits are reflected in brain responses as people spontaneously observe and interpret complex social situations that unfold over time and more closely resemble real-life interactions.”
To investigate this question in a preregistered study (with data available from the corresponding author upon request), the researchers screened 935 adults online using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, which measures grandiose traits such as exhibitionism, entitlement, and desire for authority. From this pool, the team invited right-handed adults without psychiatric or neurological diagnoses whose scores fell in roughly the top 20 percent or bottom 30 percent of the screened group to undergo functional magnetic resonance imaging, which tracks blood flow in the brain to measure neural activity.
A total of 73 participants completed the scanning session, and after excluding 15 with excessive head movement, the final brain-imaging sample comprised 28 adults with high grandiose narcissism and 30 with low grandiose narcissism, with women making up about 70 percent of the sample.
As part of the online screening survey, participants completed the Brief Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a questionnaire that assesses four facets of empathy: empathic concern (warmth and compassion for others), perspective taking (adopting another’s point of view), personal distress (unease when witnessing others’ suffering), and fantasy (identifying with fictional characters). Inside the scanner, participants watched videos of a person, played by an actor, telling four personal stories about feeling either admired or socially excluded in their youth and in the recent past. Each story was followed by a video of an evaluator delivering feedback to the storyteller, and participants were simply instructed to watch the feedback being received.
In half of the videos, the evaluator gave face-affirming feedback that supported and validated the storyteller’s account. In the other half, the evaluator delivered face-threatening feedback, challenging the storyteller’s self-image by criticizing the story as inadequate or unbelievable. After each feedback clip, participants rated their own emotional pleasantness, emotional intensity, sense of control, and pride on a 1-to-9 scale.
The researchers focused their brain analysis on three structures involved in different aspects of empathy. One was the anterior insula, a region folded deep within the fissure between the frontal and temporal lobes that helps generate gut emotional feelings and share others’ distress. The other two were the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area on the upper outer surface of the front of the brain involved in emotion regulation and perspective-taking, and the posterior cingulate cortex, a structure near the back of the brain’s inner midline that helps link another person’s situation with one’s own personal memories. Using a standard brain atlas, the researchers divided these three regions into 16 smaller subregions and analyzed each separately.
To examine how participants processed the roughly four minutes of negative feedback videos, the team used a technique called intersubject correlation, which compares the moment-to-moment rise and fall of brain activity between every pair of participants within a group. When two people process a scene in a similar way, their brain activity tends to peak and dip at the same moments, producing a high correlation. An earlier neuroimaging study using this approach found that people with similar personality traits tend to show more synchronized brain activity when watching realistic videos.
The researchers had also predicted in their preregistration that the high-narcissism group would show weaker overall activation in these regions. To test this, they ran a more traditional analysis that measured the strength of brain activation during six 15-second moments when the evaluator most bluntly dismissed the storyteller’s account.
On the empathy questionnaire, participants in the high-narcissism group reported lower empathy than those in the low-narcissism group on three of the four scales. Specifically, the high-narcissism group scored lower on perspective taking (averaging 11.4 versus 14.4) and empathic concern (13.0 versus 15.5), as well as personal distress, while the difference on the fantasy scale was not statistically significant.
In the post-video ratings across all 73 scanned participants, watching negative feedback lowered emotional pleasantness (averaging 5.03 out of 9, compared to 6.26 after supportive feedback), raised emotional intensity, and slightly reduced feelings of pride. Watching supportive feedback after a story about being admired boosted pleasant feelings for participants in the low-narcissism group, an increase that was not statistically significant in the high-narcissism group.
In the brain-imaging analyses of the negative, face-threatening feedback videos, participants with high grandiose narcissism showed weaker neural synchronization with one another than the low-narcissism group in five subregions of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex. After correcting for multiple comparisons across all 16 subregions, the difference remained statistically significant in two: a lower section of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and a rear section of the right posterior cingulate cortex. When the researchers analyzed the supportive feedback videos, differences in brain synchronization between the two groups were not statistically significant in any of the tested regions.
Contrary to the researchers’ initial predictions, brain synchronization in the anterior insula did not differ to a statistically significant degree between the high- and low-narcissism groups while watching the negative feedback videos, although one subregion on the left side came close to the statistical threshold before correction for multiple comparisons. In addition, the traditional analysis examining overall activation strength during the six 15-second peak moments of criticism did not detect statistically significant group differences in any of the three brain areas, meaning that prediction was not supported either.
In other words, the group differences in the current study showed up in how closely participants’ brain activity matched one another’s over the course of the videos, and were not detected in how strongly these regions responded during the harshest moments. The 2024 neuroimaging study described earlier similarly found no statistically significant link between grandiose narcissism and posterior cingulate activation using a traditional activation analysis.
Because the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex are closely tied to cognitive empathy and perspective-taking, the authors suggest that reduced synchronization in these areas may reflect more variable, less coherent engagement with the other person’s predicament among highly narcissistic observers.
“Our findings suggest that individuals with strong narcissistic traits may react differently than other people to situations in which another person’s self-image is threatened, potentially reflecting differences in what they pay attention to or how they interpret the situation,” Piispanen said. “In our empathy questionnaire, they also reported being less likely to consider other people’s perspectives. This may make it harder to form genuine connections with others and help explain some of the difficulties and misunderstandings that individuals with strong narcissistic traits experience in social interactions.”
“One thing that surprised us was that we did not find a statistically significant difference in the anterior insula, a brain region associated with affective empathy, meaning the sharing of another person’s emotions,” Piispanen noted. “One possible explanation is that our experimental setting involved observing and interpreting complex social interactions rather than responding to simple emotional cues, such as facial expressions or another person’s distress. This could help explain why the differences were more pronounced in brain regions associated with interpreting and understanding social situations, rather than those more closely linked to emotional resonance with others.”
The researchers also point out that earlier studies showing reduced anterior insula activity often explicitly instructed participants to empathize with the people on screen, whereas participants in the current study watched the interaction without instructions on how to feel. The authors add, however, that instructions alone probably do not account for all the differences across studies.
“Our study highlights the value of examining narcissism and empathy in socially meaningful situations that more closely resemble everyday life,” Piispanen added. “Understanding how narcissistic traits are associated with brain responses in regions associated with empathy during social interactions provides new insights into how these traits are expressed in real-world interactions and may help us understand why social interactions sometimes lead to misunderstandings or unexpected responses.”
There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these results. Lower synchronization means the brain responses of the high-narcissism participants differed more from one another. Synchronization itself is not a direct measure of empathy. As the authors point out, weaker alignment across participants can arise from wandering attention, disengagement, or varied ways of interpreting the scene, such as some highly narcissistic viewers identifying with the harsh evaluator rather than with the embarrassed storyteller.
The study also did not measure empathy or embarrassment while participants watched, so the link to perspective-taking rests on what these two brain regions typically do. Both regions also support other functions, such as attention and self-related thinking.
“An important clarification is that we examined narcissism as a personality trait, not narcissistic personality disorder, which is a clinical diagnosis,” he emphasized. “Our purpose was not to identify or diagnose narcissism in individuals, but to better understand how narcissistic traits are associated with differences in brain responses in naturalistic social situations. Furthermore, because participants were selected based on grandiose narcissistic traits, which are what people typically associate with narcissism, our findings cannot be generalized to vulnerable narcissism, which is more strongly associated with shame and sensitivity to social evaluation. It would be interesting to explore how grandiose and vulnerable narcissistic traits differ in their neural responses in similar settings in the future.”
The authors note that future studies with larger, more diverse samples will be needed to provide greater statistical power and to directly measure social emotions like vicarious embarrassment and humiliation during real-time interactions.
“Our broader goal is to provide a new perspective on narcissism by examining how narcissistic traits are expressed in social interactions, rather than focusing solely on the individual,” Piispanen said. “In our next study, we examine how narcissistic traits are associated with facial expressions, when individuals receive feedback on their own personal stories.”
“Narcissism is often discussed in stigmatizing terms, even though narcissistic traits exist on a continuum and are present to varying degrees in everyone,” he concluded. “Although these traits are relatively stable, how they are expressed may vary depending on the social context. Understanding when and why narcissistic behaviors emerge in social interactions may provide a more nuanced understanding of how interpersonal difficulties may arise.”
The study, “Reduced social brain coupling to others’ face threats in narcissism,” was authored by Matias Piispanen, Jarno Tuominen, Mariel Wuolio, Pentti Henttonen, Ville J. Harjunen, Emmi Koskinen, Elizabeth Krusemark, Enrico Glerean, Pärttyli Rinne, Mikko Sams, Anssi Peräkylä, and Juha Salmi.
