Martijn van Teffelen

Provoked aggression, psychopathy and narcissism 65 3 strengthening the conclusion that the tested conditions lead to more aggression than a control condition. Second, given that narcissistic and psychopathic women have shown to respond to provocations in similar ways as males we highly recommend future research to include both genders (Fossati et al., 2010; Wallace et al., 2012). Related to this, there is evidence that men display more dominance than women (Colarelli et al., 2006) and male-male dominance may be expressed differently than male-female dominance (Hayduk, 1983). For this reason, we decided to include a female confederate. As dominance challenges have been shown to be a function of psychopathy levels (Lobbestael et al., 2018), it would be interesting for future research to investigate aggressive responding by same-sex provocateurs. PREVENTION AND CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS The present findings stress that threat perception and affect reactivity may be important targets in prevention and intervention efforts. For example, hostile interpretation bias, a construct related to threat perception, has been shown to be successfully reduced by cognitive bias modification training in students (Hawkins & Cougle, 2013). The current findings further indicate that threat perception may be an especially important prevention and intervention target in people with narcissistic traits, who show increased threat perception under conditions of agentic threat. With regard to people with psychopathic traits the present findings indicate that emotional blunting may be an important clinical implication. Also, the provocations operationalized in this study apparently do not push the emotional buttons of people with psychopathic traits. Perhaps this may be different when these provocations are executed by people that they feel attached to. CONCLUSIONS In sum, this study showed that social exclusion and insult were comparable in producing aggressive behavior, negative affective change, and threat perception. We also observed a positive relationship between aggressive behavior after “double” provocation and narcissistic traits. This pattern of findings provides novel evidence on the equal impact of social exclusion and insult and fits with current theoretical models evidencing emotional blunting in psychopathic people and increased provoked aggression in narcissistic people. Last, although the findings suggest that while both provocations can interchangeably be implemented to study provoked aggression, the procedures may differentially impact narcissistic people.