Does high self-esteem foster narcissism? Testing the bidirectional relationships between self-esteem, narcissistic admiration and rivalry

We examined the longitudinal associations between self-esteem and narcissism in a three-wave panel study (N = 557). In a standard cross-lagged panel model, self-esteem had a positive bidirectional relationship with narcissistic admiration. Narcissistic rivalry predicted increases in narcissistic admiration, but the corresponding reciprocal cross-lagged effect was not significant, nor were the cross-lagged associations between self-esteem and narcissistic rivalry. However, a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model (which partitions between- and within-person variance) failed to identify significant cross-lagged relationships between self-esteem and admiration or rivalry. Rather, self-esteem correlated positively with narcissistic admiration (but not rivalry) only at the trait level. Furthermore, we observed positive bidirectional associations between admiration and rivalry, suggesting that the within-person fluctuations in these two sub-dimensions of narcissism mutually reinforce each other. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc, All rights reserved.