Martijn van Teffelen

Provoked aggression, psychopathy and narcissism 63 3 a positive relationship between psychopathy and provoked aggressive behavior after experiencing a combination of negative essay feedback and noise blasts (Jones & Paulhus, 2010, provocation 2). A second study reported a positive relationship between psychopathic traits and aggressive behavior after insult (Denson et al., 2009). One possible explanation for the current pattern of findings is that psychopathic traits predispose to emotional blunting for provocation. A first notion that supports this is that psychopathy theoretically relates to emotional blunting, because deficient affective responding is one of the core criteria of psychopathy (Harpur et al., 1989). Emotional blunting is therefore inherent to psychopathy. A second notion that supports this is that psychopathic patients demonstrate impairments in physiological responding (e.g., P300 amplitude and P300 latency) to aversive stimuli (Gao & Raine, 2009). When we calculated the bivariate correlation between the fearless dominance factor (i.e., a factor indicative of emotional blunting) and negative affective change we found that fearless dominance was negatively correlated to negative affective change ( r = -.30, p = .004). Importantly, the relationship between overall psychopathic traits and negative affective change in the present study just failed to reach significance, potentially indicating a power problem. Results on the impact of narcissistic traits reveal a unique predisposition to respond with aggressive behavior, but only when provoked twice (e.g., after social exclusion and receiving a noise blast during CRTT) and when psychopathic traits were controlled for. Our findings further indicate that narcissistic traits predispose to perceive both provocations as threatening, although this effect became (marginally) non-significant when psychopathic traits were controlled for. In line with our predictions, we showed that narcissistic traits related positively to perceiving an insult (i.e., an agentic threat) as more threatening than social exclusion (i.e., a communal threat) (Hypothesis 3). In contrast, we observed that threat perception suppressed aggressive responding prior to being provoked during CRTT. We hereby partly replicated previous work observing that narcissism positively predicted aggressive responding after social exclusion or insult (Bushman & Baumeister, 1998; Ferriday et al., 2011; Martinez et al., 2008; Twenge & Campbell, 2003), or when psychopathic traits were controlled for (Jones & Paulhus, 2010). Also, we replicated that narcissistic traits positively related to threat perception under agentic than under communal threat (Konrath et al., 2006). Specifically, we demonstrated a positive relationship between narcissistic traits and aggressive behavior, but solely after participants obtained noise blasts during the CRTT. This finding may indicate that narcissistic traits may predispose to enter a preparatory, or ‘ready-to-attack’ state after psychological provocation, focusing their attack on someone (i.e., in our case the CRTT opponent) only after the opponent behaves aggressively (i.e., through blasting noise). Although this reasoning seemingly contradicts the finding that narcissistic traits predispose to displayed aggression (i.e., aggression to an unknown third person) after provocation (Bushman & Baumeister, 1998; Twenge & Campbell, 2003), such an interpretation converges with a study observing a