The Dark Triad of personality is a cluster of three socially aversive personality traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy. These traits are associated with a selfish, aggressive and exploitative interpersonal strategy. The objective of the current study was to establish relationships between the Dark Triad traits (and their dimensions) and momentary affect. Machiavellianism, grandiose narcissism, vulnerable narcissism and the dimensions of the Triarchic model of psychopathy (namely, boldness, meanness and disinhibition) were examined. We used the Day Reconstruction Method, which is based on reconstructing affective states experienced during the previous day. The final sample consisted of 270 university students providing affective ratings of 3047 diary episodes. Analyses using multilevel modelling showed that only boldness had a positive association with positive affective states and affect balance, and a negative association with negative affective states. Grandiose narcissism and its sub-dimensions had no relationship with momentary affect. The other dark traits were related to negative momentary affect and/or inversely related to positive momentary affect and affect balance. As a whole, our results empirically demonstrated distinctiveness of the Dark Triad traits in their relationship to everyday affective states. These findings are not congruent with the notion that people with the Dark Triad traits, who have a dispositional tendency to manipulate and exploit others, are generally cold and invulnerable to negative feelings. The associations between the Dark Triad and momentary affect were discussed in the contexts of evolutionary and positive psychology, in relation to the role and adaptive value of positive and negative emotions experienced by individuals higher in Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy.

Introduction

In recent decades, there has been an increasing number of studies showing that personality matters because it has important consequences for individuals and enables prediction of many life outcomes [1,2]. According to an evolutionary conceptualization, inherited personality traits are visible as behavioral tendencies and have environment-contingent fitness consequences [3]. Evolutionary researchers have found associations between fitness and general personality traits [4,5]. Various studies have demonstrated that even extreme values of personality traits can be adaptive in certain environmental contexts [3]. It has been shown that some personality syndromes that are often interpreted as disorders can improve fitness due to behavioral strategies that accompany them [6,7]. Such personalities are currently extensively investigated as the so-called the Dark Triad of personality [8].

The Dark Triad is a set of dispositions fostering the use of exploitative resource acquisition strategies [9], which enables the expropriation of other people’s resources using deception, manipulation, intimidation or coercion [10]. Research showed that the Dark Triad traits can increase fitness by reinforcing an exploitative, short-term mating (preferring many casual sex partners) [11,12] and, more generally, a fast life strategy (focused on getting immediate rewards and gratifications) [13]. However, persons with dark personalities can also incur some undesirable consequences of their strategy, such as mate defection [14], instability of interpersonal relationships [15], lower sexual satisfaction [16], different health problems [17], or receiving punishments for being identified as a cheater [18]. The potential individual costs of the Dark Triad behavioral strategy were also observable as lower subjective well-being declared by respondents [19,20]. In the current study, we aimed at exploring this issue by investigating daily emotional experience (which is also regarded as a key indicator of subjective well-being) in the context of individual differences in Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy. The obtained relationships will be also interpreted in terms of evolutionary functions of emotions.

The adaptive functions of emotions rests on facilitating decisions of the allocation of behavioral effort through signaling the actual position of an individual (taking into account the state of environment and the condition of the organism) [21]. The role of emotions is to prepare an individual to respond optimally in situations that contain threats (negative emotions) or opportunities (positive emotions) [22]. Negative emotions seem particularly important because they “are defenses that help us to deal with situations that decrease fitness” [22] (p. 284). The particular emotional states may be treated as more specific programs that help individuals to cope with particular problems. In the current study, we concentrated on an analysis of the frequency and intensity of emotional states experienced in everyday life, categorized as positive or negative. It can be expected that some emotional tendencies (e.g., more frequent experiencing of negative affect, also observable as a trait negative affectivity or lower subjective well-being) [17,19,20], usually interpreted by psychologists as costs paid by individuals with the Dark Triad, can be also viewed as adaptive in light of an evolutionary theory.

The Dark Triad of personality–Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy–is a cluster of three socially aversive personality traits [8]. The Dark Triad personalities share some common features, such as disagreeableness, low empathy, selfishness, duplicity, competitiveness and manipulativeness [9]. For many years, dark traits have been viewed as maladaptive by clinical and social psychologists. However, the terms “adaptive” and “maladaptive” have different meanings in psychology (promoting or diminishing health and well-being) than they do in evolutionary biology (enhancing or reducing fitness) [23]. Therefore, “biologically adaptive traits may or may not be socially desirable or conducive to health and well-being”[23] (p. 262). Recent research has often taken an evolutionary framework perspective when studying dark personalities [11,13–15,24]. This approach makes it possible to consider the Dark Triad behaviors in terms of potential advantages and discuss their adaptive values in different areas of functioning, including emotional experience in everyday life. Interest in this latter area has, to date, been limited, as highlighted in meta-analyses [25]. While some research has focused on dark personalities’ limited empathy [26–30] and emotional intelligence [31–35] or difficulties in emotion regulation [36–39], less attention has been paid to the broader examination of the Dark Triad and affective states in daily life. Addressing this gap, the present study explores associations between Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy and momentary affective states.

The Dark Triad traits are often investigated as three unidimensional constructs. However, a growing number of studies analyze different types/dimensions of narcissism and/or dimensions of psychopathy [40–43]. The dimensional approach is particularly advantageous when affect is of interest because the variants of narcissism and psychopathy show opposing relationships with emotionality [44–49]. Such an approach was used in the present study.

Machiavellianism is a trait defined by manipulative and exploitative interpersonal style. According to Christie and Geis [50], “cool syndrome” (coldness and detached affect, being cool and rational in social situations) is a central feature of Machiavellianism. “High Machs” are described as cynical and misanthropic, with a general tendency to emotional coldness, which can help them to manipulate and exploit others. They “show less emotionality and have fewer affective reactions than other people do towards situations, others, the self, and moral issues” [51] (p. 396). However, positive correlations between Machiavellianism and neuroticism, emotional instability and susceptibility to stress [52] suggest that Machiavellian coldness may partly be “in the eye of the beholder.” Research shows that Machiavellianism is associated with alexithymia [53], difficulties in expressing emotional states [39] and is inversely related to emotional well-being [17].

Narcissism, when treated as a trait, is connected with self-love, self-absorption, a sense of superiority, and attention seeking. Research suggests that there are two variants or dimensions of narcissism: grandiose and vulnerable [44]. Grandiose narcissism is characterized by egocentrism, grandiosity, entitlement, aggression and dominance. Grandiose narcissism is also connected with extraversion, emotional resilience, self-confidence and higher declared well-being. Cross-sectional research has demonstrated a positive relationship between grandiose narcissism and positive affectivity [45,54] and a negative relationship with depression and neuroticism [55,56]. Vulnerable narcissism, on the other hand, is related to self-absorption, defensiveness, introversion, a tendency to hold unrealistic expectations, and having a fragile self-confidence. Vulnerable narcissism has been associated with neuroticism [57,45], negative affectivity [45,46], depressive and anxious temperament [58], and negatively associated with positive affectivity [45,46].

The most recent three-dimensional conceptualizations of narcissism claim that narcissism has a more complex structure [59–61]. These models supplement narcissistic grandiosity and vulnerability with the third dimension to capture their common components. In the Narcissism Spectrum Model [62], the following dimensions of narcissism are distinguished: entitled self-importance, which is the main characteristics of narcissism, and the two nearly orthogonal factors–narcissistic grandiosity and narcissistic vulnerability. In turn, the Trifurcated Model of Narcissism [63,64] proposes such dimensions as agentic extraversion, narcissistic neuroticism and self-centered antagonism (the “core” of narcissism). Despite the differences in the names of components of narcissism, the integrative models of narcissism seem congruent [64]. Both models have received empirical support [61,65,66].

In the present study, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI-13) [67,68,64] total score was used to assess grandiose narcissism and the Hypersensitive Narcissism Scale (HSNS) [57] was applied to measure vulnerable narcissism. Both questionnaires can be considered valid measures of narcissistic grandiosity and vulnerability, respectively [59,69]. Additionally, the scores on the sub-scales of the NPI allow distinguishing more antagonistic element of grandiosity (Exploitativeness/ Entitlement).

Finally, psychopathy is connected with many serious dysfunctions. The main features of psychopathy are high levels of callous and unemotional traits (e.g., lack of empathy, emotional detachment, shallow affect, incapacity for love). Research suggests that psychopathy may be a heterogeneous construct, with two or three variants [70]. Primary psychopaths have a limited ability to feel some emotions, such as fear, anxiety or guilt, that may be visible as lower negative affect; they also show higher levels of extraversion, which is in line with positive relation of primary psychopathy with positive affectivity [47–49,71]. However, other studies reported no relationship between primary psychopathy and positive affectivity and a positive association of primary psychopathy with negative affectivity [49].

The secondary variant of psychopathy is associated with impulsivity, depression, higher emotional distress, negative affect and lower positive affect [71,47,49]. The important difference between these two variants of psychopathy is in their affective deficits and anxiety/ neuroticism: primary psychopaths are deficient in emotionality and have low anxiety, while secondary psychopaths have fewer affective deficits and higher anxiety [49] (p. 529). These opposing relationships of primary and secondary psychopathy with emotionality can make correlations between emotionality and overall psychopathy non-significant [72].

The triarchic model of psychopathy [73–75] is the most current attempt to resolve the issue of multidimensionality. It includes three interrelated but distinct phenotypic constructs: meanness, boldness and disinhibition. Given the differences between them, it is useful to analyze them separately [75] (p. 360). Disinhibition is related to impulsiveness, impaired affect regulation, negative emotionality, hostility, mistrust and aggression. Meanness is defined by low empathy, callousness, excitement seeking, predatory exploitativeness, destructiveness and problems with maintaining close relationships. Boldness is connected with low anxiety, emotional resilience, interpersonal effectiveness, assertiveness and reflects more “positive” features of psychopathy. Thus, the triarchic model includes both adaptive and maladaptive aspects of psychopathy, which is especially important when sub-clinical groups are investigated. This model was used in the present study.

The aim of the current study was to establish relationships between the Dark Triad traits and momentary affective states in order to facilitate a clearer understanding of the specificity of daily affective experiences in people with dark personalities. Affect defined as “the conscious subjective aspect of emotions” [76] (p. 839) is typically measured by self-reports. Adopting a dimensional approach to affect [77–79], our study focused on the two basic affect dimensions: “positive affect” (i.e., experiencing pleasant emotions) and “negative affect” (i.e., experiencing unpleasant emotions), which can be assessed either as a state or as a trait [78]. These dimensions of emotional experience are congruent with those used in a number of evolutionary studies considering the adaptive functions of emotions [22]. The dimensions of affect can be measured using multi-item methods [80,81]. However, when subjects are asked to fill in questionnaires repeatedly (e.g., in diary or day reconstruction studies), short lists of emotional words or pictures [82,83,84] or one-item measures [85,86] can be more appropriate [87]. For this reason, we decided to use a short list of emotional words in our study.

In the current study, we followed the suggestion of Sleep, Lynam, Hyatt and Miller [88] (p. 947) that zero-order approaches should be prioritized when studying the Dark Triad constructs. Our main focus was on the bivariate relationships between affect and the Dark Triad traits: does momentary affect vary as a function of the particular Dark Triad traits? In order to examine this, we formulated the following hypotheses. First, both the results of cross-sectional studies and some features of the construct (e.g., negative world views and a negative cynical attitude toward people, which may be a source of distress) suggest that Machiavellianism would be positively associated with momentary negative affect (NA) and negatively associated with momentary positive affect (PA; Hypothesis 1). Second, we put forward a hypothesis on a positive association of grandiose narcissism with momentary PA and a negative association with momentary NA (Hypothesis 2). However, we postulate that vulnerable narcissism will be positively related to momentary NA and negatively related to momentary PA (Hypothesis 3). Finally, taking into account the fact that meanness and disinhibition are related to primary and secondary psychopathy [75], and boldness is related to grandiose narcissism [73,89], and considering the results of recent research on triarchic psychopathy dimensions [90–92], we hypothesize that: boldness will be positively related to momentary PA and negatively related to momentary NA (Hypothesis 4); disinhibition will be negatively related to momentary PA and positively related to momentary NA (Hypothesis 5), and meanness will be negatively related to momentary NA (Hypothesis 6).