Martijn van Teffelen

Chapter 3 52 aggression were positively related, but only after participants were provoked twice in a row (Jones & Paulhus, 2010). This has led some authors to propose that dysregulated affect in people with psychopathic traits, or ‘emotional blunting’, may negatively attenuate the relationship between psychopathic traits and provoked aggression (i.e., mediation) (Reidy et al., 2011). In contrast, narcissistic traits were consistently found predictive of provoked aggression, for example after receiving poor evaluation (Bushman & Baumeister, 1998), social exclusion (Twenge & Campbell, 2003), or noise blasts (Reidy et al., 2008). One theory that can account for the narcissism-aggression relationship is the threatened egotism theory. This states that people with an inflated sense of self respond with retaliation after provocation to restore self-esteem (Baumeister et al., 1996; Rasmussen, 2016). Moreover, there is reason to believe that narcissistic people may respond more aggressively to threats in the agentic domain (i.e., personal achievements and power) compared to threats in the communal domain (i.e., social acceptance) (Konrath et al., 2006). For example, narcissistic people have been shown to be less concerned about social relationships (Raskin et al., 1991) and are willing to sacrifice social acceptance to gain power (Park et al., 2013). Hence, narcissistic traits may predispose to perceiving a provocation as threatening, and especially so under conditions of agentic threat when compared to a communal threat. Following the threatened egotism theory increased threat perception would then lead to aggressive responding (i.e., moderated mediation). Taken together, studies sparsely investigated the differential impact of provocation methods on aggressive behavior and their relationship with psychopathic and narcissistic personality traits. The primary goal of current study therefore is to extend on earlier findings by comparing two provocation procedures. To enable comparability, we selected a social exclusion and an insult procedure from the literature that werematched on procedural similarity. As we expected the two provocations to have comparable outcomes, we opted to use a Bayesian statistical approach. A Bayesian approach has the advantage that both a null-hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis can be tested. The secondary goal was to explore relationships between psychopathic traits, narcissistic traits, and aggression. Because previous studies investigated psychopathic and narcissistic traits in relative isolation of each other both traits were statistically residualized to assure personality-trait specific conclusions. Specifically, we hypothesized that: 1. Social exclusion and insult will be equal in terms of our primary outcome, i.e., aggressive behavior, and secondary outcomes, i.e., change in negative affect and perceived threat. 2. Psychopathic traits are negatively associated with negative affective responding in response to threat and, in turn are negatively associated with aggressive responding. 3. Narcissistic traits are positively associated with perceived threat, especially under conditions of agentic threat and, in turn, are positively associated with aggressive responding (i.e., moderated mediation).