The Relationship Between College Students' Narcissistic Personality And Counterfactual Thinking:the Mediating Role Of Self-Handicapping

Counterfactual thinking refers to the mental activity of negating events that have occurred in the past and constructing a possible hypothesis.Since Kahnemen and Tversky first proposed counterfactual thinking in 1982,it has received widespread attention from psychologists at home and abroad.In the discussion of the mechanism of counterfactual thinking,most studies have emphasized the effect of situational variables on counterfactual thinking.Little attention has been paid to the influence of individual differences.Narcissism,as a personality trait,has a ubiquitous presence in the crowd.It is a universal behavior pattern with self-respect and self-importance as the core.Based on the literature review,this study introduces the self-handicapping variable and attempts to further empirically investigate the relationship between narcissistic personality and counterfactual thinking and the role of self-handicapping in both.In this study,900 college students in Zhengzhou and Kaifeng districts were selected as survey subjects,Counterfactual Thinking for Negative Events Scale,The Narcissism Scale and Self-handicapping Scale were used to investigate,Independent sample T test,paired sample T test,Pearson product-moment correlation,regression analysis,Bootstrap and other statistical methods were used to analyze the data to explore the characteristics of college students' counterfactual thinking and narcissism,self-handicapping,and the relationship among them.Through this research,the following results were obtained:1.College students' nonreferent upward counterfactual thinking is significantly higher than nonreferent downward counterfactual thinking;self-referent upward counterfactual thinking is significantly higher than other-referent upward counterfactual thinking;counterfactual thinking has significant differences in the place of origin and only child.2.The level of overt narcissism of college students is significantly higher than the level of covert narcissism;total score of narcissism,covert narcissism have significant differences in gender;total score of narcissism,overt narcissism,covert narcissism have significant differences in the place of origin;total score of narcissism,covert narcissism have significant differences in the only child.3.College students' self-handicapping has significant differences in the place of origin and major.4.College students' narcissism,self-handicapping,and counterfactual thinking are closely related to each other,and college students' narcissism has a positive predictive effect on self-handicapping.College students' narcissism and self-handicapping have a positive predictive effect on counterfactual thinking.5.The self-handicapping of college students plays a partial mediating role between narcissism and counterfactual thinking.