Disturbed emotion recognition in patients with narcissistic personality disorder

Although theoretically the lack of empathy is a supposed key symptom of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), empirical studies examining empathy in NPD are scarce.

That’s telling. Maybe there should be more narcissistic researchers in this area. Beef it right up high five.

It was found that patients with NPD did not differ from both control groups on a self-report questionnaire indicating that patients regard themselves as sensitive to the feelings of others.

Naturally. Everything is fine here. Move along. Or stay and drink it in, it’s pretty great.

On the contrary, it was found NPD patients generally performed worse on a facial emotion recognition task compared to both control groups. In addition to this general deficit in emotion recognition, patients with NPD showed a specific deficit for emotions representing fear and disgust.

whaaa… but everything’s cool right?

These results provide the first empirical evidence for impaired emotion recognition in patients with NPD.

welp.