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Does Religiosity Reduce Narcissistic Personality Disorder? Examining the Case of Muslim University Students

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Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the influences of religiousness on the prevalence of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) among young adults. Prevalence of three forms of Allportian religious orientation, three forms of quest religious orientation and seven symptoms of NPD were examined through self-reported measures. 618 randomly selected Muslim students from the four public sector Pakistani universities participated in the study. Three research instruments comprising Religious Orientation Scale developed by Gorsuch and McPherson, Quest Scale developed by Batson and Schoenrade and Narcissistic Personality Inventory developed by Raskin and Terry were used to collect the data. All subscales demonstrated more than .70 Cronbach Alpha Coefficients. The findings demonstrate comparatively higher presence of intrinsic, extrinsic personal and extrinsic social religious orientations among the Pakistani Muslim young adults. The presence of NPD symptoms remains higher among the participants too. The study concludes that the religious orientations significantly explain the variances in the prevalence of NPD symptoms among the Muslim university students with the direct effects of intrinsic and extrinsic personal religious orientations and indirect effects of quest religious orientations.

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Correspondence to Muhammad Ayub Buzdar.

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The authors certify that they have no financial or non-financial conflict of interest with any organization related with the contents and subject of this paper.

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All procedures performed in the current study including data collection from the human participants were in accordance with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Proposal of this research was presented and approved by the Board of Studies in Education, Government College University, Faisalabad (a substitute of the Ethical Approval Committee) before starting the research.

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All the research participants were informed about the objectives and procedure of the study. The data were collected after acquiring their informed consent.

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Buzdar, M.A., Tariq, R.U., Jalal, H. et al. Does Religiosity Reduce Narcissistic Personality Disorder? Examining the Case of Muslim University Students. J Relig Health 58, 1463–1470 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-018-0628-9

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