Self-enhancement and coping:The costs and benefits of positive illusions

Abstract

The relation between self-enhancement and psychological adjustment has been controversial and so far open to debate since the influential paper of Taylor and Brown (1988). In the current investigation the relationship between two measures of self-enhancement (narcissism and over-claiming) and coping (constructive thinking) in a sample of young, healthy adults (N = 168) was examined. The structural model showed an equally strong relation of self-enhancement to good and poor coping, thus confirming the hypothesis that self-enhancement has both adaptive and maladaptive effects. The different patterns of relations between two measures of selfenhancement and coping were also detected, which corroborates the idea that the controversy regarding the adaptive value of self-enhancement is to a large extent caused by different measures of self-enhancement.