Carolyn C. Morf is a Swiss-American social and personality psychologist specializing in narcissism as a personality disposition. Her research seeks to understand the self-regulatory processes (cognitive, emotional, behavioral) through which individuals with narcissistic personality features construct and maintain their desired grandiose self-views. She was one of the first psychologists to move research on narcissism beyond inferences from clinical case studies in psychotherapy into the social-personality experimental lab. This opened the way for it to become the testing ground for seeing how narcissism and other personality types are constructed psychologically.
Personal History and Educational Background
Morf was born in 1961 in Wimbledon, England. Her parents were both Swiss born but had immigrated to the USA in their early 20s (and were spending an interim period in England). Morf’s life has been marked by a frequent back and forth between the USA and Switzerland, her two countries...
Selected Bibliography
Horvath, S., & Morf, C. C. (2009). Narcissistic defensiveness: Hypervigilance and avoidance of worthlessness. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 1252–1258.
Morf, C. C., Horvath, S., & Torchetti, L. (2011). Narcissistic self-enhancement: Tales of (successful?) self-portrayal. In M. D. Alicke & C. Sedikides (Eds.), Handbook of self-enhancement and self-protection (pp. 399–424). New York: Guilford.
Morf, C. C., & Mischel, W. (2012). The self as a psycho-social dynamic processing system: Toward a converging science of self-hood. In M. R. Leary & J. P. Tangney (Eds.), Handbook of self and identity (2nd ed., pp. 21–49). New York: Guilford.
Morf, C. C., & Rhodewalt, F. (1993). Narcissism and self-evaluation maintenance: Explorations in object relations. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 668–676.
Morf, C. C., & Rhodewalt, F. (2001). Unraveling the paradoxes of narcissism: A dynamic self-regulatory processing model. Psychological Inquiry, 12, 177–196.
Morf, C. C., Schürch, E., Küfner, A., Siegrist, P., Vater, A., Back, M., Mestel, R., & Schröder-Abé, M. (2017). Expanding the nomological net of the pathological narcissism inventory: German validation and extension in a clinical inpatient sample. Assessment, 24, 419–443.
Morf, C. C., Weir, C. R., & Davidov, M. (2000). Narcissism and intrinsic motivation: The role of goal congruence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 424–438.
Rhodewalt, F., & Morf, C. C. (1998). On self-aggrandizement and anger: A temporal analysis of narcissism and affective reactions to success and failure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 672–685.
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Morf, C.C. (2018). Morf, Carolyn C.. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_2247-1
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