Narcissism, selfie addiction and positive life orientation among adolescents: A gender perspective

Pages: 748-756
Vandana Pandey and Soni Kewalramani (Amity Institute of Behavioral & Allied Sciences, Amity University, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh)

Adolescence (12-26 yrs) is the most rapid phase in the human development. It is transitional period from childhood to adulthood where a lot of changes take place. The personality of an individual contains Dark triad: Narcissism, Psychopathy and Machiavellianism (Paulhus, 2002). There are two types of narcissism pathological and non pathological. In the non pathological form the individual uses strategies to promote positive self image, maintain dominance in social hierarchy, they have positive illusions about their self and the pathological form are insensitive towards criticism, they cannot process shame, they do their work no matter how they do and they lack empathy. Selfie is defined as a self portrait picture, commonly taken with a camera or mobile phone held in the hand or supported by a selfie stick (Hendricks, 2012). There has been a wide debate that selfie addiction has changed to a mental disorder it starts as fun and then change to addiction and it is called as selfitis (Donita, 2015) but some researchers deny that it is a disorder. Positive life orientation was defined as a positive mindset in which an individual develops or constructs the reality in such a way that a positive meaning is derived from any situation and they expect positive outcome from every situation. The purpose of this study is to find the gender difference in Narcissism, Positive Life Orientation and Selfie Addiction among Adolescents. The sample taken is 100 students from different universities of Lucknow by Random sampling technique. The tools used in the present study are Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI40), Solanki Selfie Addiction Scale and Scale of Positive Life Orientation. The results indicated that there is a significant gender difference in Narcissism and Selfie Addiction and there is no significant gender difference in Positive Life Orientation.