The DOI matches its Crossref record; 75 of the 75 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Lack of empathy in patients with narcissistic personality disorder
Abstract
The study's objective was to empirically assess cognitive and emotional empathy in patients with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). To date, "lack of empathy" is a core feature of NPD solely based on clinical observation. The study's method was that forty-seven patients with NPD, 53 healthy controls, and 27 clinical controls with borderline personality disorder (BPD) were included in the study. Emotional and cognitive empathy were assessed with traditional questionnaire measures, the newly developed Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET), and the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC). The study's results were that individuals with NPD displayed significant impairments in emotional empathy on the MET. Furthermore, relative to BPD patients and healthy controls, NPD patients did not show deficits in cognitive empathy on the MET or MASC. Crucially, this empathic profile of NPD is not captured by the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV for Axis II Disorders (SCID-II). The study's conclusions were that while NPD involves deficits in emotional empathy, cognitive empathy seems grossly unaffected.
Overview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
“NPD is associated with neurophysiological deficits in emotional empathy, together with intact cognitive empathy, and influenced by a complex interaction between motivational, self-regulatory, and interpersonal processes (e.g., engagement versus disengagement), as well as by emotional dysregulation and intolerance (49–52).”
From Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Progress in Understanding and Treatment (2022) · cites this paper as [49]
In the citing paper
“Subjects affected by narcissistic personality disorder show greater impairment in affective aspects while their cognitive part of empathy appears preserved.”
From The dark side of empathy in narcissistic personality disorder (2023) · cites this paper as [17]
In the citing paper
“Ritter et al. (17) demonstrated that people affected by NPD have issues in emotional, but not cognitive empathy, possibly because reading others’ emotions might be useful to reach personal purposes (31).”
From The dark side of empathy in narcissistic personality disorder (2023) · cites this paper as [17]
In the citing paper
“Research highlights main obstacles both in the bottom-up pathway among narcissists, but the cognitive parts of empathy seem damaged as well (3, 17, 18).”
From The dark side of empathy in narcissistic personality disorder (2023) · cites this paper as [17]
In the citing paper
“Evidence demonstrated a reduced deactivation of the right AI (rAI) and an increased activation of the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), DLPFC, and premotor areas in reaction to non-emotional faces among HN people (17).”
From The dark side of empathy in narcissistic personality disorder (2023) · cites this paper as [17]
In the citing paper
“The results obtained show low levels of emotional empathy in narcissists but normal levels of cognitive empathy.”
From Symptom severity and mindreading in narcissistic personality disorder. (2018) · cites this paper as [37]
Citations
Cites
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
American Psychiatric Association (2013) · doi:10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596 · Cited by 116,369
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
Williams, J. B. W., & First, M. B. (2013) · Oxford University Press eBooks · doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199975839.013.104 · Cited by 109,845
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Widiger, T. A. (2000) · Oxford University Press eBooks · doi:10.1037/10518-009 · Cited by 19,766
(1998) · The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry · Cited by 19,139
Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach.
Davis, M. H. (1983) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.44.1.113 · Cited by 10,272
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. B
Press, H. (1886) · Cited by 10,087
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd ed
Cooper, A. M., & Michels, R. (1981) · American Journal of Psychiatry · doi:10.1176/ajp.138.1.128 · Cited by 7,419
The mini international neuropsychiatric interview
Lecrubier, Y., Sheehan, D. V., Hergueta, T., & Weiller, E. (1998) · European Psychiatry · doi:10.1016/s0924-9338(99)80239-9 · Cited by 5,899
(1980) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 4,712
Empathy: its ultimate and proximate bases
Preston, S. D., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2002) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x02000018 · Cited by 4,126
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Fonagy, P., Luyten, P., Moulton-Perkins, A., Lee, Y.-W., Warren, F., Howard, S., Ghinai, R., Fearon, P., & Lowyck, B. (2016) · PLOS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0158678 · Cited by 754
“For instance, BPD patients often score normally on self-report questionnaire measures of empathy [35], a core component of RF with regard to others, while they typically perform worse than normal controls on experimental tasks assessing cognitive empathy [34, 36].”
BackgroundCox, C. L., Uddin, L. Q., Di Martino, A., Castellanos, F. X., Milham, M. P., & Kelly, C. (2012) · Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience · doi:10.1093/scan/nsr051 · Cited by 333
Neuronal correlates of altered empathy and social cognition in borderline personality disorder
Dziobek, I., Preißler, S., Grozdanovic, Z., Heuser, I., Heekeren, H. R., & Roepke, S. (2011) · NeuroImage · doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.05.005 · Cited by 300
Self-citationBehrends, A., Müller, S., & Dziobek, I. (2012) · The Arts in Psychotherapy · doi:10.1016/j.aip.2012.02.003 · Cited by 263
Self-citationSocial cognition in borderline personality disorder
Roepke, S., Vater, A., Preißler, S., Heekeren, H. R., & Dziobek, I. (2013) · Frontiers in Neuroscience · doi:10.3389/fnins.2012.00195 · Cited by 184
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Ritter, K., Dziobek, I., Preißler, S., Rüter, A., Vater, A., Fydrich, T., Lammers, C.-H., Heekeren, H. R., & Roepke, S.
- Affiliations
- Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (DE)
- Max Planck Institute for Human Development (DE)
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (DE)
- Asklepios (DE)
- Freie Universität Berlin (DE)
- Corresponding author
- Ritter, Kathrin
- Roepke, Stefan
- Venue
- Psychiatry Research
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2011-05
- Volume
- 187
- Issue
- 1-2
- Pages
- 241-247
- ISSN
- 0165-1781 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2148003635
- Cited by
- 287
- References
- 75
- Citations by year
- 2026: 9 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 20 · 2022: 25 · 2021: 18 · 2020: 20 · 2019: 21 · 2018: 17 · 2017: 22 · 2016: 20 · 2015: 15 · 2014: 27 · 2013: 23 · 2012: 16
- FWCI
- 16.54
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Psychiatry Research (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (submittedVersion)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Charité — University Medicine Berlin
- Sonnenfeld-Stiftung,” Berlin
- Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion,” Berlin
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Personality Disorders and Psychopathology
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Personality Traits and Psychology
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Psychopathy, Forensic Psychiatry, Sexual Offending
- Keywords
- narcissistic personality disorder, empathy, affective empathy, cognitive empathy, borderline personality disorder, SCID-II, social cognition
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Analysis of Variance, Cognition Disorders, Empathy, Female, Humans, Male, Neuropsychological Tests, Personality Disorders, Psychometrics, Reproducibility of Results, Statistics, Nonparametric, Mood Disorders, Young Adult
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
