AGGRESSION AND NARCISSISM: VALIDATING RELATIONSHIP IN INDIAN CONTEXT

Researches in Psychology have been attempting to understand associations between personality and aggressive behaviour to develop some interventional strategies to reduce aggression. Among personality factors, narcissism is considered a potential variable that plays an important role in aggressive behaviour. Narcissists seem to be overly reactive when their grandiose views are not confirmed or threatened by others, and they often become overtly aggressive. The aim of present study was to see if there are any differences in the levels of narcissism among individuals high and low on aggression. It was hypothesized that highly aggressive individuals exhibit more narcissistic features as compared to less aggressive individuals and males would be higher on narcissism as compared to females. For this purpose, 136 individuals with equal number of males and females in the age range of 18-21 years were randomly selected from various colleges of three cities of the state of Punjab (Patiala, Ludhiana and Chandigarh), India who were given Aggression Questionnaire (Buss & Perry, 1992) and Narcissistic Personality Inventory (Raskin & Terry, 1988). Two-way ANOVA showed that highly aggressive individuals were more narcissistic as compared to low aggressive individuals.