A recent study suggests that people with higher levels of certain socially aversive personality traits, specifically narcissism and psychopathy, tend to experience lower physical and psychological reactions to acute stress. These findings provide evidence that these personality traits might offer a form of biological resilience when facing high-pressure situations. The research was published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology.
Psychologists use the term Dark Triad to describe a group of three overlapping personality traits that involve callousness and a tendency to manipulate others. These three traits are narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Narcissism involves an inflated sense of self-importance, grandiosity, and a strong desire for dominance.
Psychopathy is characterized by a lack of empathy, impulsive behavior, and a tendency to ignore rules. Machiavellianism involves a strategic, calculating approach to social interactions. People high in Machiavellianism often manipulate others for personal gain without feeling remorse.
Adam O’Riordan, an assistant professor of psychology and director of the Psychophysiology, Health, and Stress Evaluation Laboratory at the University of Texas at San Antonio, wanted to understand how these traits interact with the body under pressure.
“My line of research focuses on how psychological factors influence stress coping and cardiovascular health,” O’Riordan told PsyPost. “The Dark Triad was of particular interest in this study, as recent evidence suggests that under certain circumstances, traits such as psychopathy and narcissism may confer resilience, despite their well-established maladaptive interpersonal consequences. Therefore, we aimed to examine whether Dark Triad traits (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) were associated with cardiovascular and psychological responses when we exposed them to stress.”
To understand how the body responds to immediate pressure, scientists look at cardiovascular reactivity. This concept refers to the physical changes in the heart and blood vessels that occur during a stressful event. For example, a person’s heart rate might increase, or their blood vessels might constrict to raise blood pressure. High cardiovascular reactivity means a person’s heart is working much harder when they feel anxious or threatened.
Over time, exaggerated physical responses to stress tend to increase the risk of developing heart disease and other health issues. A major issue with past research into personality and stress is that the three Dark Triad traits share a lot of psychological overlap. People who score high in one trait often score high in the others because all three share a common core of antagonism.
The researchers designed this project to look at all three traits at the same time to account for this overlap. Modeling the traits together allows scientists to separate out the independent, unique effects of each specific personality dimension. The researchers recruited 139 undergraduate students for a controlled laboratory experiment. The sample included slightly more women than men, and the average age of the participants was about 19 years old.
Before the testing began, the researchers screened out participants who had existing cardiovascular conditions or took medications that affect heart rate. Participants first completed a series of questionnaires to measure their baseline levels of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. They then sat quietly for a ten-minute resting period so the research team could record their baseline physical metrics. The scientists measured systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, mean arterial pressure, and heart rate at regular intervals during this resting phase.
After the resting period, participants completed a highly demanding mental arithmetic task designed to induce acute psychological stress. They were asked to start with the number 1022 and continuously subtract the number 13. They had to calculate the math in their heads and speak their answers out loud to the research team.
If a participant made a math error or took longer than ten seconds to provide an answer, the researcher forced them to start over from the very beginning. To make the situation feel even more uncomfortable, the researcher wore a white laboratory coat. This detail was intended to create a sense of formal social evaluation and psychological distance between the participant and the observer.
Blood pressure and heart rate monitors continuously measured the participants’ physical responses throughout the five-minute math challenge. The researchers calculated cardiovascular reactivity by subtracting the participants’ resting baseline measurements from their stressful math task measurements. The researchers also accounted for factors like age, gender, smoking habits, and body weight to ensure these outside variables did not skew the results. Right before and immediately after the task, participants also rated how stressed and anxious they felt on a numerical scale.
The mental math task successfully caused significant increases in both physical and psychological stress across the group. Heart rates went up, blood pressure spiked, and participants reported feeling much more anxious than they did before the task began. However, how strongly the participants reacted depended on their specific personality traits.
Participants who scored higher in narcissism reported feeling significantly less anxious after the task compared to other participants. Higher narcissism also predicted lower increases in systolic blood pressure, which is the pressure in the arteries when the heart beats. Additionally, highly narcissistic individuals showed lower increases in mean arterial pressure, which represents the average pressure in the blood vessels during a single heartbeat.
Psychopathy also influenced how participants responded to the uncomfortable math challenge. People with higher psychopathy scores reported finding the task significantly less stressful overall. These individuals also displayed a much smaller increase in their heart rate during the difficult math problems.
Machiavellianism did not show a strong connection to physical stress responses in the initial tests. To make sure their findings were accurate, the researchers ran additional statistical models that included all three Dark Triad traits at the very same time. This statistical step helps separate the unique effects of each trait from their shared manipulative characteristics.
When looking at all three traits simultaneously, the link between narcissism and lower mean arterial pressure remained significant. The connection between psychopathy and a lower heart rate response also stayed strong. The association between narcissism and lower subjective anxiety remained consistent in these stricter models as well.
A few of the initial findings lost their statistical significance during these stricter tests. The relationship between narcissism and lower systolic blood pressure became too weak to be considered a robust effect. The link between psychopathy and lower self-reported stress also faded in the adjusted models. Interestingly, when all traits were combined, Machiavellianism actually predicted slightly higher levels of subjective anxiety.
O’Riordan summarized the primary takeaways from the experiment. He noted that the findings offer a new perspective on these typically negative personality types. “Our findings reveal that individuals high in narcissism and psychopathy report lower levels of anxiety, experience less stress, and exhibit lower blood pressure and heart rate responses when exposed to psychological stress,” O’Riordan said.
“Therefore, while these traits have a ‘dark’ side and are often viewed as maladaptive due to their antagonistic core, there also appears to be something about these traits that may help individuals cope with stress more effectively,” O’Riordan said. “Whether this is driven by a sense of superiority, a belief that one is better than others, or a more callous and emotionally numb mood, remains an open question for our future research to address.”
While these findings are informative, the authors point out a few limitations to the current study. The questionnaires used to measure the Dark Triad traits were relatively short and did not capture every subtle dimension of the personalities. For example, the survey mainly measured grandiose narcissism but missed vulnerable narcissism, which involves insecurity and defensiveness.
The statistical reliability of the personality surveys in this sample was also somewhat modest. This means the questions might not have measured the traits as perfectly as a longer, more detailed survey would have. Another limitation involves the specific group of people who participated in the experiment.
The sample was entirely made up of healthy young college students. The physiological effects might look different in older adults or people with existing health conditions. The laboratory task also represented just one specific type of acute stress. Real-world stressors involving more intense social judgments or personal threats could potentially trigger different physical reactions.
Some scientists suspect that a low physical response to stress might actually be a sign of emotional blunting. Emotional blunting happens when the brain fails to process important emotional information properly, which can lead to maladaptive behaviors. However, because highly narcissistic and psychopathic participants reported feeling genuinely less anxious, the authors suspect their low physical reactions reflect a protective form of biological resilience.
This resilience might help explain why some socially aversive traits are linked to better long-term cardiovascular health in certain situations. The ability to keep one’s heart rate and blood pressure stable under pressure offers a physical advantage. This suggests that traits like narcissism and psychopathy, despite their negative social consequences, provide an internal buffer against the physical wear and tear of daily stress.
The study, “Examining the association between the dark triad personality traits and cardiovascular reactivity to acute psychological stress,” was authored by Adam O’Riordan, Tyler L. Minnigh, and Aisling M. Costello.