The Importance Of Narcissism In Psychology

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Growing up in a small, rural town in the Mississippi delta and coming from an immigrant family played a significant role in tuning my affinity for psychology. In my community, most of my peers were familiar or related to one another and the cultural values and customs that I grew up with were discordant from what my peers valued. Because of this discrepancy, respecting my immigrant cultural identity while simultaneously avoiding the negative social influence of my peers was often a very difficult task. The voices of my parents still resonate in my ear as they would say, “We came to America, young and alone, in order to take advantage of the opportunity for a higher education, just to make the foundation of life easier for you.” By my parents …show more content…

I took an independent lead starting from the project’s inception. My study was composed to examine narcissism and the perceived quality of friendships among late adolescents. Narcissism was an interesting and relevant topic as it related to peer relationships, and much of the literature established an association between narcissism and many social problems such as delinquency, peer conflict, and bullying and victimization. However, for my thesis, I was interested in narcissism in relations to more intimate interpersonal relationships such as friendships. From there on, I conducted a literature review and composed my own questions and hypotheses about how youth who are high in narcissistic traits may perceive closeness, cooperation, and competitiveness among their friendships. My other responsibilities for this project included writing an IRB proposal, contacting a high school, and recruiting participants from that high school. Also, learning how to set up questionnaires for my survey through Qualitrics software enabled me to understand the online process of collecting my own data. Out of all my research experiences this academic year, a big accomplishment was having one of my side research projects on narcissism, peer conflict, and anxiety accepted into the 2014 Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies convention (ABCT) …show more content…

Through pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Penn State, I want to continue investigating the assessment of adolescent personality and relationships in addition to understanding family and peer influences on problematic behavior. Specifically, my goal will be to investigate whether family and peer conflict/dynamics may be associated with children’s and adolescents’ personality (i.e., pathological and non-pathological narcissism; self-esteem) and, susceptibility to negative peer influence/pressure or peer victimization while also examining services that may mitigate such problems. Additionally, I would be interested in examining peer relationships in reference to emotional, social, and identity development and how such information could inform interventions such as peer social skills training. Based upon my prospective research interests, I aspire to work with Dr. Aaron L. Pincus because of his work on the examination and validation of pathological narcissism (i.e., grandiose and vulnerable narcissism) and its interpersonal

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