Emotional processes underlying national narcissism.

Abstract

Within the current manuscript, we assumed that national narcissism should be linked to poor emotion recognition skills and negative emotionality. In a series of four mixed-methodology studies, we found positive relations between national narcissism and one's own impairment of emotion recognition, lower levels of facial emotion recognition, and higher levels of antagonistically oriented emotions. We also demonstrated that an inability to recognize emotions of others (characteristic for national narcissism) may, in turn, translate into dehumanization of in-group and out-group. By highlighting these relations, we argue that group defensiveness can be linked to a specific form of emotionality.