The Reflection in the Pond

One of the most fascinating areas of human psychology is that gray zone where normality bumps up against pathology. We all know melancholy, even if we’re not all clinically depressed. We’re all bothered by fears, but few of us suffer through diagnosable paranoia.

And so it is with narcissism. At its pathological extreme, narcissism is a debilitating personality disorder, characterized by grandiose ego and total lack of personal intimacy. Closer to home, we have all dated a narcissist. Maybe even recently.

If you’re still harboring resentments against the narcissist in your life, then you would probably also embrace the prevailing theory about narcissists: that is, that underneath all that bravado and insensitivity narcissists loath themselves for their own inadequacies. Believing this offers a quiet, harmless kind of revenge.

Well, sorry. As satisfying as that theory is (and believe me, I’m right there with you), apparently it’s not entirely valid. When psychologists test narcissists, to tap into their hidden thoughts about themselves, those thoughts don’t come up uniformly negative. Indeed, they appear to have a mix of unconscious feelings, some negative but some as inflated as the face they show the world.

Does that mean we have to abandon our sense of superiority over the narcissists in our lives? Maybe not. Psychologist W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia suspected that narcissists might indeed be insecure—but only in certain ways. That is, they might love themselves when it comes to traits like intelligence and status and dominance—power traits. But that doesn’t mean they don’t harbor doubts deep down inside for failing to be moral, kind and compassionate human beings.

Campbell and his colleagues decided to test this idea. They had a group of confirmed narcissists take a word test that tapped into their automatic, uncensored views of themselves. But they modified the standard test so that sometimes it used mostly words that resonated a sense of cooperation, belonging and generosity on the one hand, or suffering and evil on the other—community values, in other words, but both positive and negative values. At other times they modified the test so that it emphasized values like assertiveness and energy on the one hand, or quiet and inhibition on the other.

The results were clear. As reported in the March issue of Psychological Science, the narcissists’ grandiosity—the obnoxious, self-absorbed person they project to the world—was mirrored in their unconscious self-assessments, but only when it came to things like achievement and dominance. Both internally and externally, they were puffed up, full of themselves—masters of their universe in their minds. But when it came to community values like helping and affection, there was no meaningful link, one way or the other. They didn’t hate themselves for failing to connect; it’s more like the vocabulary of connectedness didn’t exist for them.

So narcissists may not be secretly full of self-loathing. But their sense of self is cock-eyed and out of balance. Psychologists of course appropriated the concept of narcissism from the Greek myths. Narcissus was a young man of such commanding beauty that every mortal fell immediately and passionately in love with him, but the youth had no heart. He had no love to return because he loved himself so much, so much that he talked incessantly about his high-powered job and his stock portfolio and . . . no, wait, that wasn’t a myth.

Pumping Emotional Iron

You should be feeling really good about yourself right now. You managed to bite your tongue at the office when your hypercritical boss lit into you. So that was good, disciplined and professional. You kept your head down all day, focusing on a tedious but important deadline project that needed your total concentration. And you did all this while not smoking, day three, even though a long drag on a Marlboro sure seemed like a good idea at times. You should be patting yourself on the back.

So why, if you’ve had such a good day, are you about to collapse on the sofa with a quart of Cherry Garcia and watch reruns of Desperate Housewives? When you showed such self-control all day, why indulge all your mindless weaknesses now?

Psychologists have an idea why. Restraint and self-discipline, they say, are hard work—real effort, not unlike weightlifting. And just as you can overtax your biceps or abs, you can also deplete your reserve of emotional control. When life comes at you hard and you persevere, you quite literally use up your potential to do the right thing one more time.

This is where the muscle analogy breaks down a bit. When we overdo it at the gym, we know it; our achy and tired muscles won’t let us forget. But we don’t always know it when we’ve made excessive demands on our self control. We don’t say, hey, I held my temper, worked hard and didn’t smoke—I must be emotionally fatigued. Indeed, we may even be feeling proud or elated, but inside that disciplinary part of our brain, we’re wasted. And we are ripe for all sorts of lapses.

But what if there were a way to monitor self-regulatory expenditure and fatigue—and thus risk for relapse? Two University of Kentucky psychologists speculated that our capacity to control ourselves might be related to heart activity, mostly because there is a lot of overlap between brain structures responsible for behavior and the heart. Suzanne Segerstrom and Lise Solberg Nes decided to keep track of one measure of cardiac regulation called heart rate variability, to see if it might be a reliable indicator of self-discipline.

They ran a two-part experiment. In the first, they tracked volunteers’ heart rate variability while they were either resisting temptation or giving in to it. Resisting temptation for the purposes of the experiment meant eating carrots while passing on a plate of chocolates and cookies; giving in to temptation meant, well, giving in to temptation. As predicted, heart rate variability was higher when volunteers were actively overriding their appetite for sweets, suggesting that the heart is mirroring effortful self-regulation.

In a second part of the experiment, the psychologists had the volunteers take a very difficult cognitive test. The test involved anagrams, some of which were actually impossible, and the idea was to see how persistent the volunteers were when faced with a mental challenge. Those who had exerted themselves earlier by resisting sweets were less determined when it came to the analogies; it appears they used up their stores of self-discipline. Again, as reported in the March issue of Psychological Science, heart activity predicted performance on the test, suggesting it is a good measure of capacity for discipline. In other words, heart rate variability is a good proxy for the mental strength needed to buckle down—or to resist temptation.

This may all be a matter of efficient use of energy. Humans, like all organisms, have a limited supply of fuel and have to make constant trade-offs for survival. When confronted with a threat, for example, the body directs the lion’s share of its available energy to the heart and large muscles, to equip it for either escape or battle. Self-regulation is a bit different in that it often requires mental effort in order not to act. Heart rate variability it an indicator of energy conservation. It’s possible, the psychologists say, that the heart puts on the breaks to reduce its energy demands, making more fuel available for the mental effort needed for calm reflection.

So is all this going to help you go easy on the Cherry Garcia and not bark at your kids? Probably not, at least not right away. You have to wear a cardiac monitor to keep track of your heart rate variability, and that’s not practical for those of us just coping with everyday mental and emotional demands.

But what about an addict struggling through early recovery? In a separate study, alcoholics who were having an easier time with abstinence had higher heart rate variability than did relapsers when exposed to drinking “triggers”—an old watering hole, for example. Most people are capable of overriding self-regulatory fatigue if they know they’re at a vulnerable spot and can actively bolster their motivation to stay the course, so feedback from a heart monitor might be useful. It’s sort of like your heart telling you to be strong.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit "We're Only Human . . ." at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

How Do I Hate Thee?

Long before pop culture turned "bitchin" into a synonym for cool, "bitch" was one of the more derogatory epithets you could hurl at a woman. Indeed, man’s best friend doesn’t fare well in the human vocabulary of hate: mongrel, cur, dog itself—they’re all common insults. And it’s not just canines: Pig, rat, cow, mule, ape—if you want to malign your enemy, borrow freely from the animal kingdom.

Why is this? If you want to suggest that someone is less than human, why take it out on the beasts of the earth? You could just as easily marginalize a foe by comparing him to a machine, yet you never hear: “Get lost, you robot!” (Well, rarely) Or: “You son of an android!”
Scientists are very interested in the ways we deny humanity to others, because this common tendency is the source of so much hate and violence in the world. What kind of cognitive crunching takes place when we marginalize another human being? What is the psychology of an epithet?

Psychologists Stephen Loughnan and Nick Haslam of the University of Melbourne decided to look behind overt insults to see if we do in fact malign others in a variety of ways, some more subtle than others. They hypothesized that, while animals and machines are both less than human, they are less than human in very different ways. That is, dogs and cows lack traits that are unique to humans, like high intelligence and moral sensibility, while androids and robots lack traits that form the foundation of “human nature”: warmth, flexibility, animation. They further predicted that some humans—like children and artists—tend to be associated with animals, lacking traits like civility and self-control. Others—say, businessmen—more typically lack openness and emotion; in our minds, they are more like robots.

They studied this idea by having volunteers take a common word association test to see how readily they linked different traits with different types of people and with different non-humans. The volunteers were exposed very quickly to a lot of words: say “briefcase,” “fun-loving,” “hard-hearted,” “platypus” and “software.” They had to decide instantaneously whether to link “briefcase” (or “suit” or “boardroom”) with “fun-loving” or “hard-hearted,” and with “platypus” or “software.” Or instead of “briefcase,” they might be flashed “easel” or “surrealism” to see if they mentally linked it to “trusting” or “rude,” “kangaroo” or “machine.”

You get the idea. The rapid response times were important, because the scientists were trying to get as close as possible to automatic, unconscious associations—what we think even if we don’t yell it at somebody. And guess what? As predicted and reported in the February issue of Psychological Science, machine imagery was closely associated with commerce and its trappings, and animals with artists and artistry. Furthermore, androids and business people had stronger mental connections to intelligence and sophistication, while animals and artists were more strongly linked to emotionality and animation.

What this means is that we have two distinct ways of defining humanity to ourselves—and two distinct ways of denying others’ their humanity. In other words, even in the absence of overt dislike, our minds may be subtly and automatically dehumanizing people—out of our conscious awareness, every day. We may not be shaking our fists and shouting, “You son of a bitch!” But somewhere back in the brain’s recesses, we may be thinking, “You automaton!”

For more insights into human nature, visit www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.