A Finnish team scanned 58 people with high and low narcissistic traits while they watched an actor being humiliated, and found the high-trait brains did not sync with one another.
Empathy in narcissists is not missing, it is off-sync. A team at Aalto University put 58 people in an MRI scanner and showed them an actor recounting moments of being admired and being snubbed.
In people low in narcissistic traits, brain activity moved together, as if they were cringing along with the actor; in those high in the traits, the brains were not aligned with each other. The researchers suggest this may mean they were attending to different details, not that they did not care at all.
That explanation is kinder than 'narcissists are cold', and harder to verify.
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