Putting self at stake by telling a story: Storyteller’s narcissistic traits modulate physiological emotional reactions to recipient’s disengagement

Emmi Koskinen; Pentti Henttonen; Ville Harjunen; Elizabeth Krusemark; Matias Piispanen; Liisa Voutilainen; Mariel Wuolio; Anssi Peräkylä

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0302703

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionFebruary 1, 2024
6 Mar 2024 Decision Letter - Tzen-Yuh Chiang, Editor PONE-D-24-01565Putting self at stake by telling a story: Storyteller’s narcissistic traits modulate physiological emotional reactions to recipient’s disengagement PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Koskinen, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 20 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. 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The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: “This work was supported by the Research Council of Finland, project numbers 319113 and 320248 (https://www.aka.fi/en/), and the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (https://www.sls.fi/en).” Please state what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role, please state: "The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript." If this statement is not correct you must amend it as needed. Please include this amended Role of Funder statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 3. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. 4. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: This manuscript explores a conversational experiment where participants tell a personally meaningful story ("close call") to an unknown co-participant. The co-participant is instructed to either listen to the story intently, or is given a mental computational (distraction) task. Therefore in the two conditions the level of interactional engagement is systematically modified. Explorations between these two conditions were conducted regarding the quality of interaction between the participants, subjective ratings of emotional arousal, and psychophysiological activity. Importantly, the authors were also specifically interested in any associations between narcissistic features (grandiosity/vulnerability) and the key outcome variables under examination, and indeed they reported some associations between narcissistic functioning and elevated interpersonal hypersensitivity - which is noteworthy. Overall, due to the experimental design and focus on narcissistic pathology the study is highly novel, it asks an important scientific question with hypotheses that follow clearly from prior research, it is well written, its methods were rigorous and well described and the findings (including non-significant findings) were meaningfully discussed. Despite a number of the hypotheses not being supported, as well as some inherent limitations regarding design of the study, this manuscript provides a meaningful contribution to the literature that likely can serve as a template for future research and experimental designs to extend and improve on. This is the basis of my recommendation for the article. Notwithstanding, there are a few points the authors may wish to consider in a subsequent revision: - Being that a key variable in this study is narcissistic pathology, it was somewhat surprising the very brief narcissism measures were used to operationalize this element. As a result, it is reasonable to quite seriously question the robustness of the narcissism variable under examination and any conclusions to be drawn (particularly if there were more significant findings). Further, the two expressions of narcissism were measured using scales that are somewhat contradictory in their theoretical assumptions (i.e., 'healthy/adaptive' and 'pathological' expressions). While there is some discussion of this regarding the use of the Five-Factor-Model trait variants, but I think more could be made of this limitation, which is quite central to the design of the study. - A similar limitation relates to the sample under examination being university students. While quite a common convenience sample to select, it is not ideal for examining narcissistic pathology as scores in published literature using such samples tend to be quite low - which again raises question to what extent are we truly examining narcissistic pathology. Again, there is a comment on this in the limitations, however this could be expanded. While of course nothing can be done in the current design to account for this, the authors could comment on possible experimental designs that would allow for a more robust examination, using clinical samples and more rigorous narcissism and psychopathological constructs to help guide future research which may like to build on this study. - Finally, while some participant demographics and measures descriptives are variously included in text throughout, the manuscript would benefit from a table summarizing these features in order to assist readers to understand the sample under examination better. Thankyou for the opportunity to review this interesting manuscript. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: Yes: Nicholas Day ******** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. 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Revision 1
26 Mar 2024 Author Response PLOS ONE: Response to Reviewers Dear Editor and Reviewers of PLOS ONE, We thank you for the valuable feedback and useful suggestions to improve our manuscript. In this memo we respond to the comments and questions raised to the best of our abilities. Reviewer #1: Notwithstanding, there are a few points the authors may wish to consider in a subsequent revision: - Being that a key variable in this study is narcissistic pathology, it was somewhat surprising the very brief narcissism measures were used to operationalize this element. As a result, it is reasonable to quite seriously question the robustness of the narcissism variable under examination and any conclusions to be drawn (particularly if there were more significant findings). Further, the two expressions of narcissism were measured using scales that are somewhat contradictory in their theoretical assumptions (i.e., 'healthy/adaptive' and 'pathological' expressions). While there is some discussion of this regarding the use of the Five-Factor-Model trait variants, but I think more could be made of this limitation, which is quite central to the design of the study. Thank you for this insightful comment. Narcissism research has identified unique, but overlapping dimensions of narcissism (e.g., grandiose and vulnerable narcissism) that incorporate traits and behaviors that can be viewed as respectively adaptive (e.g., grandiosity, high self-esteem, extraversion) and pathological (e.g., vulnerability, low self-esteem, increased psychopathological symptoms). Despite their distinctions, both aspects of grandiose and vulnerable narcissism are related to psychopathological and interpersonal outcomes (e.g., both are related to Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), relationship difficulties, and elevated reactivity to socio-evaluative stressors). Recent research has also noted that these manifestations of narcissism may best be captured using multiple narcissism measures or more recently developed (and less established) multi-factor narcissism measures. Our decision to use the NPI and the PNI was based on a review of previous research demonstrating their respective capabilities to capture the grandiose and vulnerable dimensions. Moreover, brief versions of these measures were recently validated in a Finnish sample (see Henttonen et al., 2022, and comments below). Finally, we wanted to include multiple narcissism dimensions while keeping the total experiment duration to a minimum and keep the ratio of time used for the paradigm and form-filling reasonable. However, we carefully examined and decided on the selected measures prior to the experiment. To our understanding, the brief versions of NPI (Gentile et al., 2013) and PNI (Schoenleber et al., 2015) have demonstrated convergent and divergent validity comparable to the original versions using adequately sized samples among clinical and community participants. In a separate prior validation study (n=439, Henttonen et al., 2022), using a comparable sample, the translated brief versions of the questionnaires were observed to demonstrate good psychometric properties in general and in relation to other brief measures of narcissism (HSNS, g-FLUX). Affirming previous findings, NPI-13 accounted for the greatest amount of variance in self-reported PDQ-NPD symptoms and conformed to the expected pattern of higher self-esteem and well-being, while SB-PNI Vulnerability exhibited the largest predictive power for diminished self-esteem, well-being and psychopathology. The references to the original and brief versions of the scales and the Finnish validation study are included in the Method section (p. 10), whereas rationale concerning the contemporary debate on grandiose-vulnerable vs three-facet dimensions of narcissism is included in the discussion section in the original manuscript. However, we have added an additional statement to the limitations section (page 18): “due to experimental constraints, brief versions of the measures were used to operationalize narcissism. Usage of full-length versions and/or additional scale instruments could potentially increase the psychometric accuracy in measuring the underlying trait(s) of interest.” - A similar limitation relates to the sample under examination being university students. While quite a common convenience sample to select, it is not ideal for examining narcissistic pathology as scores in published literature using such samples tend to be quite low - which again raises question to what extent are we truly examining narcissistic pathology. Again, there is a comment on this in the limitations, however this could be expanded. While of course nothing can be done in the current design to account for this, the authors could comment on possible experimental designs that would allow for a more robust examination, using clinical samples and more rigorous narcissism and psychopathological constructs to help guide future research which may like to build on this study. In this study we adopted a continuum view of narcissism where individuals are seen to exhibit traits of grandiose and vulnerable narcissism in varying degrees, ranging from low levels to pathological levels. According to this view, studying participants with relatively low levels of these traits can still provide insight on the phenomenon of narcissism in general. We have also tried to select our scale instruments carefully in order to also include pathological aspects of narcissism (see the comment above). However, as there is also evidence that while grandiose and vulnerable narcissism are unrelated at low-to-moderate levels of grandiose narcissism, they are related at high levels of grandiose narcissism (Jauk et al. 2022) and thus there can be special physiological patterns regarding individuals with clinically relevant narcissism. We have now expanded the limitations section to include this information, as well as made suggestions for future studies according to the reviewer’s suggestion (see page 19). - Finally, while some participant demographics and measures descriptives are variously included in text throughout, the manuscript would benefit from a table summarizing these features in order to assist readers to understand the sample under examination better. We have included full information of the participant demographics, per condition and role, regarding age and NPI/PN sum scores in the new Table 1 (page 7). The table also depicts the experimental measures, per condition, of rated story quality, teller performance, recipient affiliation, PANAS valence, arousal and dominance. Other table identifiers have been modified accordingly. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0302703.r002
10 Apr 2024 Decision Letter - Tzen-Yuh Chiang, Editor Putting self at stake by telling a story: Storyteller’s narcissistic traits modulate physiological emotional reactions to recipient’s disengagement PONE-D-24-01565R1 Dear Dr. Koskinen, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. 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If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: (No Response) ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: (No Response) ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: (No Response) ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The changes made to the manuscript improve its clarity and utility as a piece of scientific literature, namely the inclusion of key limitations, suggestions for future research and descriptive data on key measures (so readers will have a clearer picture of the sample under examination, which is important). I thank the authors for their response and for providing necessary additions and modifications. ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: Yes: Nicholas Day ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0302703.r003
Formally Accepted
11 May 2024 Acceptance Letter - Tzen-Yuh Chiang, Editor PONE-D-24-01565R1 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Koskinen, I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team. At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following: * All references, tables, and figures are properly cited * All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission, * There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset If revisions are needed, the production department will contact you directly to resolve them. If no revisions are needed, you will receive an email when the publication date has been set. At this time, we do not offer pre-publication proofs to authors during production of the accepted work. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few weeks to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps. Lastly, if your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at customercare@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Tzen-Yuh Chiang Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0302703.r004

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