Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a personality disorder characterized by a life-long pattern of exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a diminished ability to empathize with other people's feelings. Narcissistic personality disorder is one of the sub-types of the broader category known as personality disorders. It is often comorbid with other mental disorders and associated with significant functional impairment and psychosocial disability.
Rapport is a close and harmonious relationship in which the people or groups concerned are "in sync" with each other, understand each other's feelings or ideas, and communicate smoothly.
A personality test is a method of assessing human personality constructs. Most personality assessment instruments are in fact introspective self-report questionnaire measures or reports from life records (L-data) such as rating scales. Attempts to construct actual performance tests of personality have been very limited even though Raymond Cattell with his colleague Frank Warburton compiled a list of over 2000 separate objective tests that could be used in constructing objective personality tests. One exception, however, was the Objective-Analytic Test Battery, a performance test designed to quantitatively measure 10 factor-analytically discerned personality trait dimensions. A major problem with both L-data and Q-data methods is that because of item transparency, rating scales, and self-report questionnaires are highly susceptible to motivational and response distortion ranging from lack of adequate self-insight to downright dissimulation depending on the reason/motivation for the assessment being undertaken.
Perfectionism, in psychology, is a broad personality trait characterized by a person's concern with striving for flawlessness and perfection and is accompanied by critical self-evaluations and concerns regarding others' evaluations. It is best conceptualized as a multidimensional and multilayered personality characteristic, and initially some psychologists thought that there were many positive and negative aspects.
Interpersonal attraction, as a part of social psychology, is the study of the attraction between people which leads to the development of platonic or romantic relationships. It is distinct from perceptions such as physical attractiveness, and involves views of what is and what is not considered beautiful or attractive.
Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI), developed by Leslie Morey, is a self-report 344-item personality test that assesses a respondent's personality and psychopathology. Each item is a statement about the respondent that the respondent rates with a 4-point scale. It is used in various contexts, including psychotherapy, crisis/evaluation, forensic, personnel selection, pain/medical, and child custody assessment. The test construction strategy for the PAI was primarily deductive and rational. It shows good convergent validity with other personality tests, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and the Revised NEO Personality Inventory.
Agreeableness is a personality trait referring to individuals that are perceived as kind, sympathetic, cooperative, warm, honest, and considerate. In personality psychology, agreeableness is one of the five major dimensions of personality structure, reflecting individual differences in cooperation and social harmony.
Parataxic distortion is a psychiatric term first used by Harry S. Sullivan to describe the inclination to skew perceptions of others based on fantasy. The "distortion" is a faulty perception of others, based not on actual experience with the other individual, but on a projected fantasy personality attributed to the individual. For example, when one falls in love, an image of another person as the "perfect match" or "soul mate" can be created when in reality, the other person may not live up to these expectations or embody the imagined traits at all.
The dark triad is a psychological theory of personality, first published by Delroy L. Paulhus and Kevin M. Williams in 2002, that describes three notably offensive, but non-pathological personality types: Machiavellianism, sub-clinical narcissism, and sub-clinical psychopathy. Each of these personality types is called dark because each is considered to contain malevolent qualities.
Interpersonal compatibility or interpersonal matching is the long-term interaction between two or more individuals in terms of the ease and comfort of communication.
In psychology, grandiosity is a sense of superiority, uniqueness, or invulnerability that is unrealistic and not based on personal capability. It may be expressed by exaggerated beliefs regarding one's abilities, the belief that few other people have anything in common with oneself, and that one can only be understood by a few, very special people. The personality trait of grandiosity is principally associated with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), but also is a feature in the occurrence and expression of antisocial personality disorder, and the manic and hypomanic episodes of bipolar disorder.
Jerry S. Wiggins (1931–2006) was an American personality and clinical psychologist known for developing scales to assess the traits in the circumplex model, writing and editing texts on personality theory and psychometrics and for developing measures of interpersonal behavior.
Self-esteem can be defined as how favorably individuals evaluate themselves. According to Leary, self-esteem is the relationship between one's real self and one's ideal self, feeding off of favorable behaviors. It refers to an individual's sense of their value or worth, or the extent to which a person values, approves of, appreciates, prizes, or likes themselves. Self-esteem is generally considered the evaluative component of the self-concept, a broader representation of the self that includes cognitive and behavioral aspects as well as evaluative or affective ones. There are several different proposals as to the functions of self-esteem. One proposal is that it satisfies the inherent need to feel good about oneself. Another is that it serves to minimize social rejection. Self-esteem is also known as a way for a person to remain dominant in relationships. Self-esteem is known to protect people from potential fear that arises from the prospect of death. Motivating individuals towards their goals, high self-esteem fosters effective coping, while low self-esteem tends to result in avoidance.
The Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy scale (LSRP) is a 26-item, 4-point Likert scale, self-report inventory to measure primary and secondary psychopathy in non-institutionalized populations. It was developed in 1995 by Michael R. Levenson, Kent A. Kiehl and Cory M. Fitzpatrick. The scale was created for the purpose of conducting a psychological study examining antisocial disposition among a sample of 487 undergraduate students attending psychology classes at the University of California, Davis.
Within personality psychology, it has become common practice to use factor analysis to derive personality traits. The Big Five model proposes that there are five basic personality traits. These traits were derived in accordance with the lexical hypothesis. These five personality traits: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience have garnered widespread support.
In psychology, a facet is a specific and unique aspect of a broader personality trait. Both the concept and the term "facet" were introduced by Paul Costa and Robert McCrae in the first edition of the NEO-Personality Inventory (NEO-PI) Manual. Facets were originally elaborated only for the neuroticism, openness to experience, and extraversion traits; Costa and McCrae introduced facet scales for the agreeableness and conscientiousness traits in the Revised NEO-PI. Each of the Big Five personality traits in the five factor model contains six facets, each of which is measured with a separate scale. The use of facets and facet scales has since expanded beyond the NEO PI-R, with alternative facet and domain structures derived from other models of personality. Examples include the HEXACO model of personality structure, psycholexical studies, circumplex models, the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ), and the California Psychological Inventory.
Delroy L. Paulhus is a personality psychology researcher and professor. He received his doctorate from Columbia University and has worked at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Davis. Currently, Paulhus is a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses. He is best known for being the co creator of the dark triad, along with fellow researcher Kevin Williams.
Paul Raymond Gilbert is a British clinical psychologist. Gilbert is the founder of compassion focused therapy (CFT), compassionate mind training (CMT) and the author of books such as The Compassionate Mind: A New Approach to Life's Challenges and Overcoming Depression.
In the field of personality psychology, Machiavellianism is the name of a personality trait construct characterized by interpersonal manipulation, indifference to morality, lack of empathy, and a calculated focus on self-interest. Psychologists Richard Christie and Florence L. Geis created the construct and named it after Niccolò Machiavelli, as they used truncated and edited statements similar to his writing style to study variations in human behaviors. Their Mach IV test, a 20-question, Likert-scale personality survey, became the standard self-assessment tool and scale of the Machiavellianism construct. Those who score high on the scale are more likely to have a high level of manipulativeness, deceitfulness and a cynical, unemotional temperament.
Terence J. G. Tracey is an American psychologist, author and researcher. He is professor emeritus of counseling and counseling psychology at Arizona State University. He is also a visiting professor at University of British Columbia. He has served in many administrative positions at Arizona State University including department head and associate dean. He is the former editor-in-chief of Journal of Counseling Psychology.
