University Honors

Understanding the stability and evolution of personality disorders, particularly narcissism, remains a critical challenge in psychology [1]. Traditional longitudinal approaches often focus on linear changes and rank-order stability, potentially overlooking nuanced patterns and oscillatory behavior [1, 2]. In this study, we adopt a dynamical systems approach to model the temporal evolution of narcissistic traits and other personality dimensions, capturing both linear and cyclic dynamics that static models might miss. Using eigenvalue analysis and numerical integration techniques [3, 5], we examine how traits such as superiority and exploitative tendencies exhibit growth trends, while others, like exhibitionism, demonstrate oscillatory or decreasing behavior. Our results contrast with previous meta-analytic findings [1], which reported that most personality disorder criteria decrease over time, with some stability in antisocial and obsessive-compulsive traits. Additionally, Grijalva et al. [2] found a consistent decline in narcissistic traits across the lifespan, with agentic, antagonistic, and neurotic narcissism all demonstrating negative growth trajectories. Unlike these prior works, our analysis highlights the coexistence of increasing, de- creasing, and oscillatory dynamics within individual traits, reflecting a more complex temporal landscape. This novel perspective not only questions the assumption of linear decline [1, 2], but also provides a framework to understand how personality dynamics may adapt or fluctuate in response to social and cultural influences. Our findings suggest that integrating dynamical systems theory into per- sonality research could lead to more nuanced therapeutic strategies [6], where clinicians capitalize on oscillatory periods of trait relaxation to foster breakthroughs in therapeutic settings. Future studies with larger datasets and extended observation periods are essential to generalize these find- ings and further explore the interplay between trait evolution and sociocultural dynamics.