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1. 00:01 by now you all know that I'm a genius but I'm also the most honest person I've ever met And just between you and me I am drop dead gorgeous Well more drop dead than gorgeous But still if you have ever come across a narcissist true and blue you would know
2. 00:27 that narcissists are in the habit of doing this attesting about themselves telling everyone around them that they're perfect they're brilliant they're amazing they're unprecedented they are handsome they are brilliant they're geniuses The narcissist goes around spewing sentences
3. 00:52 and statements and prepositions that elevate him that aggrandise him that enhance him And this self-enhancement is a very uh important clinical feature of pathological narcissism because grandiosity is a trait or a cognitive distortion that is common to many other
4. 01:18 mental health issues Border lines are grandiose Psychopaths are grandiose People with bipolar disorder in the manic phase are grandiose Grandiosity is not enough to distinguish the narcissist from everybody else It's not a good differential criterion But this constant boasting and
5. 01:40 bragging and swaggering these are usually unique to the narcissist The narcissist needs is on a constant quest to elicit narcissistic supply from his human environment He provides triggers and cues and stimuli hoping to obtain in
6. 02:02 return feedback and input which would serve to enhance butress support justify and confirm his self-concept which is inflated counterfactual grandiose fantastic and very often quite comic The narcissist therefore is in constant pursuit of narcissistic supply fishing
7. 02:31 for compliments The narcissist solicits narcissistic supply the way the oldest profession solicits something completely different And so this is a unique feature of narcissism This constant selfaclamation the topic of today's video and I propose narcissism and
8. 02:56 self-aclamation My name is Sam Vaknin I'm the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited I am also a professor of psychology Let us delve right in There are four reasons why the narcissist goes around praising himself putting himself above others declaring himself
9. 03:24 superior Four reasons First of all definitions Bragging and boasting To brag or to be boastful is to be excessively proud and talk about one's achievements or possessions According to the dictionary acclamation is a loud and enthusiastic approval But narcissists engage in
10. 03:52 selfaclamation It's as if they don't trust others to acclaim them They don't trust others to praise them It's as if they say to themselves if not me then who i am going to make sure that I'm being acclaimed by choosing the path of self acclamation but becoming
11. 04:16 self-sufficient I'm going to I'm I'm going to render myself self-contained not in need of anyone independent And I'm going to do that by constructing my own or reconstructing my own grandiosity I'm going to tell myself that I'm a genius I'm going to tell
12. 04:35 myself that I'm handsome I'm going to tell myself that I'm perfect because maybe no one else will So self-aclamation has four critical functions Number one self- supply The narcissist is always anxious about the next hit the next fix the next dose
13. 04:59 of narcissistic supply This anxiety is an undercurrent in pathological narcissism and requires self soothing Self- supply therefore is not only delusional but also anxolytic It reduces anxiety and self- supply is often verbalized aloud As I said the narcissist would
14. 05:25 walk around and say "I'm the most moral and honest person I've ever known." He would attest He would testify that he is a genius He would insist on it This is verbalized or externalized self-upply
15. 05:43 The second uh reason the second psycho psychological need met via self-aclamation is loyalty testing The narcissist spews out these self aggrandizing statements and sits back awaiting the reaction If you dispute the claim if you poo poo it if
16. 06:06 you mock the narcissist if you disagree with the narcissist if you try to temper temper it down a bit bring it to proportion reduce it to proportion then you are being disloyal You cannot be trusted So it's a kind of loyalty testing Narcissist says for example I'm
17. 06:25 an amazing genius I have revolutionized this field or that field and you say "Well you're very clever You're very smart Uh sometimes you have good ideas but I wouldn't say that you have revolutionized the film." And of course at that minute you're out You're fired
18. 06:43 to borrow a phrase from a very famous narcissist You're fired and you need not
19. 06:51 reapply These statements self-aclamation is therefore a form of loyalty testing Self- acclamation has a third reason third cause and that is the attempt at self-justification The wish to conform to an in an idealized internal image or internal internal object So the
20. 07:14 narcissist for example might consider himself to be a good person or as I said the genius or whatever and then the self-aclamation is a way to justify behaviors and events and occurrences that sit ill do not conform to the internalized idealized object the ego
21. 07:42 ideal as Freud called it The narcissist has a self-concept that is out of out of touch with reality and this self-concept is subject to push back by reality reality is harsh and unforgiving and lot a lot of the information and data emanating from
22. 08:05 reality are harsh and undermine the narcissist um totally counterfactual self-concept And one way to cope with this is by repeating adnosium claims that tend to in the narcissist mind substantiate his grandiosity support it butress it elevate it enhance it So in
23. 08:33 the third reason is is therefore self-justification and self-enhancement If the narcissist believes that he's a good person and yet acted in an evil way he's going to reframe it and cast himself as a moral hero or a rescuer or a savior or a guru or a teacher and he's
24. 08:52 going to do this aloud He's going to verbalize it Similarly if the narcissist consider himself himself to be a genius and has just said something really really cringeworthy and stupid he's going to reframe the situation is going to claim that he is a genius heart And
25. 09:11 this self- acclamation is um form of self soothing shell firewall that isolates the narcissist from total self-awareness and that tends to perpetuate the narcissist's cognitive distortion when it comes to who he is his strengths his skills his talents and his perfection
26. 09:39 And finally self-aclamation is what we call a signaling stimulus Now narcissists engage in multiple forms of signaling Two of the most famous are humility and virtue signaling They're very common in narcissism Pseudo humility is when the narcissist acts modest and humble but
27. 10:04 it's all fake of course and intended to elicit narcissistic supply or solicited Um similarly pseudo stupidities when the narcissist pretends to be stupid in order to sadistically mock and torment people around him or to um sleep under the radar as a covert
28. 10:26 narcissist for example in order to passive aggressively undermine or sabotage something and so on So pseudo humility is also a form of signaling I'm a bit stupid don't worry about me Pseudo infantilization is another form of signaling when the narcissist actually
29. 10:43 signals I'm a child I'm a child at heart Don't harm me Don't be angry at me Be loyal to me Love me unconditionally Stick around I'm a child There's also a form of signaling And so as you see there are many forms of the signaling Self-aclamation is no exception It is a
30. 11:02 form of signaling The narcissist informs the environment that um he is so superior so unique so amazingly unprecedented so godlike that it might be difficult to perceive this But society has to adopt and accept these truths about the narcissist So it's a kind of educ educational
31. 11:32 signaling kind of signaling that is intended to modify perceptions cognitions behaviors in the recipient or the recipients It could be a collective or an environment the workplace church or political party the nation state you name it So self- acclamation in this case would
32. 11:51 be a signal that says you are misjudging me You are misperceiving me because of your own limitations and you need to trust me on this I'm really a superior being I'm really uh I really attain the a god-like perfection And the only reason you don't
33. 12:12 see this is not because you are you're evil or wicked and not even because you envy me but maybe you are not capable of seeing it So this is signaling form of signaling Of course every signal uh is intended to elicit a counter signal Signaling is a two-way street usually
34. 12:31 intended to elicit some reaction some behavioral change in the recipients And the narcissist is hoping to convert people into his view of himself into his self-concept via the self acclamation When this fails it's clear that the people who fail to appreciate the
35. 12:50 narcissist magnanmity the narcissist genius the narcissist lares the narcissist charity and altruism the narcissist morality the narcissist superiority People who fail to appreciate all this are clearly envious or malevolent themselves or profoundly stupid Okay
36. 13:13 Signaling is described in psychology using signal detection theory SDT Signal detection theor theory has a very interesting history It's a body of concepts and techniques and it is a part of what is known as communication theory which is used in the exact sciences for
37. 13:35 example in electrical engineering and in quasi exact sciences such as decision theory and for example signal detection theory is used in in the detection of radar signals and other types of signal when there's a lot of noise And so initially these concepts were applied to
38. 13:59 to engineering tasks and then they evolved and they found their way into auditory and visual psychophysics in the late 1950s But now signal detection theory is widely used in many areas of psychology An important methodological contribution of this theory has been the refinement
39. 14:24 of psychophysical techniques to permit the separation of sensitivity from criterial decision-making factors So we're able to break apart to to disentangle and deconstruct decision making processes using signal detection theory And it provides a valuable
40. 14:46 theoretical framework for describing perceptual and other aspects of cognition Also it allows to quantitatively relate psychosoysical phenomena to findings from sensory physiology to map map the mind onto the body so to speak And a key notion of
41. 15:07 this theory is that human performance in many tasks is limited by variability in the internal representation of stimuli due to internal or external noise Many of the theoretical notions of this theory were anticipated by Louisie uh thirst t a t h ur
42. 15:31 s t o n first it's also called detection theory So if we apply this to the narcissist we see that the narcissist makes an assumption about the noise to signal to noise ratio in other people The narcissist thinks that other people are very noisy They they they have a brain they
43. 15:55 have brain fog And so his aim is to increase the signal to enhance the signal so that it can penetrate the fog of noise and impress upon people the veracity and validity of the narcissist self-concept Narcissist uses self-aclamation as a form of
44. 16:16 amplification and magnification of what he considers to be the signal in order to overcome the background of noise in people's minds and brains And when we try to apply signal detection theory to narcissism we are well advised to use two concepts D prime
45. 16:40 D prime is a measure of an individual's ability to detect signals More specifically it's a measure of sensitivity or discriminability derived from signal detection theory Um the D prime is not affected by biases and prejudices It's the core ability to
46. 17:01 detect signals and it is the difference between noise and signal in a more complex mathematical way And so the narcissist would assume that people's D prime is low And what he would attempt to do he would attempt to change the noise distribution to allow the signal to
47. 17:27 prevail And what is the signal the signal is I'm a genius I'm brilliant I'm perfect I'm godlike I'm superior That's a signal as far as a narcissist is concerned And of course this is an inversion of reality because what the narcissist call signal is actually the noise It's
48. 17:47 counterfactual It's not related to reality It's totally fictitious and and invented Yet in the narcissist inverted mind not to say demented mind the signal the noise is the signal And whatever passes for signals with other people is actually noise to be overcome via self
49. 18:11 acclamation And this leads to the last concept of today's video The receiver operating characteristic curve or the ROC curve in a detection discrimination or recognition task The ROC is the relationship between the proportion of correct yes responses the heat the hit
50. 18:33 rate and the proportion of incorrect yes responses the false alarm rate or the miss rate and we plot it on a graph and we show an individual sensitivity related of course to a particular task The axis in the graph are heat rate and false alarm rate And then we we we make po we
51. 18:55 we create points We mark points and we this denotes the different rates obtained under different conditions The points are connected to form a smooth arc So an ROC curve may be used to indicate for example how well a person detects a specific tone in the presence
52. 19:14 of noise there it's a single quantitative index of performance um in a way because when we calculate the ROC and conflate it with other ROC's other graphs we can obtain a performance index from the individual calculated from this curve and other curves it's also known
53. 19:34 asensensitivity function or response operating characteristic curve again the narcissist assumption is that he should he should impact the curve He should move it in a way that would change the yes responses the correct yes responses and the incorrect
54. 19:58 yes responses So when the narcissist first confronts a person any person is very unlikely to agree with the narcissist selfassessment and self-evaluation The narcissist would say "I'm a genius." Most other people would disagree The narcissist would say "I'm
55. 20:18 drop dead gorgeous." Most other people would smirk and laugh there In other words what the narcissist considered to be a hit rate What the narcissist consider to be correct yes responses other people usually perceive as wrong responses The narcissist noise is
56. 20:39 mispersceived by the narcissist to be a signal The narcissist's misinformation and disinformation are mispersceived by the narcissist to be forms of verified data The narcissist world is completely topsyturvy and now the narcissist needs to prevail on people so that to change
57. 20:59 their minds to brainwash them to entrain them so that their ROC their receiver operating characteristic curve is inverted All the false alarms all the the miss rate become hits and all the hits become false alarms misses So it's a mirror image of the
58. 21:25 correct ROC curve This is one of the main tasks of self acclamation It's kind of pushing the listeners or the recipients of the self-aclamation to invert the way they see the narcissist If he says I'm a genius and the correct response is you're not the narcissist wants them to
59. 21:49 say you are So he wants them to adopt the false alarms the mi the misses the wrong answers and to begin to believe that they have the right ones And so you as you see unconsciously of course most narcissists uh wouldn't know what is signal detection theory Unconsciously the
60. 22:11 narcissist makes use of communication theory signal to noise ratios signal to noise curves sensitivities and other sophisticated tools in order to invert your mind to attract you into the fantasy into the twilight zone the surrealistic space within which the
61. 22:36 narcissist is a god Everything in this world is upside down topsyturvy But you having entered this realm you are supposed to confirm to the narcissist and agree with him that everything within this fantastic space is the only reality and everything outside it is a false alarm