Abstract
The present study examined the relationships between narcissism and ego identity during the developmental transition from adolescence to early adulthood. Samples of 371 undergraduate and graduate students between the ages of 18-25 years (adolescents) and 352 adults between the ages of 26-35 years (early adulthood) completed a questionnaire which consisted of narcissism scales and an ego identity scale. The results of correlation analyses showed that multidimensional narcissistic indices for two dispositions ("need for attention and praise" and "lack of empathy") were more strongly correlated with ego identity for the early adult sample than for the adolescent sample. In addition, the results of a multiple-group analysis showed that these two narcissistic dispositions predicted ego identity more negatively in the model for the early adulthood data than in the model for the adolescent data. These results indicate that diminishment of these two narcissistic dispositions is a developmental task of adolescence, and that if the young person's efforts to overcome these dispositions were to fail, the formulation of ego identity could be more difficult.
