Narcissism and self-presentation on Facebook: A sentiment analysis of adolescents' on-line interactions

The spread of Social Networks (SNs) has strongly changed communication and information sharing, and those modifications are particularly significant in adolescents, who were born in an “open cyber world”. Despite research has clearly demonstrated how adolescents are the main social networks users, and even though Facebook importance to self-present and to give attention-seeking opportunities to narcissistic individuals, few studies investigated the relations among these aspects. The present study investigated the “mappability” of the adolescent narcissistic trait, by means of the analysis of their behaviors on SNs. In order to evaluate such a trait, our research developed a new metric to automatically assess the online narcissism, using the Linguistic Inquiry World Count program (LIWC). Our results confirmed the recent literature and showed how narcissists are more prone to disclose personal information than the others. Moreover, many significant correlations were found with the LIWC macro categories (i.e. linguistic, cognitive, biological and affective processes), highlighting how narcissists display more structured posts, and use more physical and sexual words than the others. The new metric was able to evaluate the narcissistic trait in adolescents, exploiting just few (public) wall posts. Finally, after an appropriate validation on a larger and more representative sample of population, the model shall provide an effective algorithm to assess automatically such a personality trait, as well as to represent a model simple enough to fit real data and to simulate different social scenarios