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VOL. 13, ISSUE 3 (2026)
Buying to feel better? dark triad personality and emotional intelligence in adolescent shopping addiction: A narrative review
Authors
Saurabh Kumar Mishra, Shailendra Kumar Singh
Abstract
Shopping addiction —
compulsive buying-shopping disorder, to use its clinical name — is now widely
treated as a behavioral addiction: a preoccupation with buying that a person
cannot rein in and does not stop even once the costs are obvious. Its symptoms
cluster most heavily in late adolescence and emerging adulthood, which makes
the near-total absence of adolescent research on the topic rather striking.
Personality work on compulsive buying has, so far, stayed almost entirely
within normal-range trait frameworks; the Dark Triad of narcissism,
Machiavellianism, and psychopathy — traits that are socially costly rather than
simply unusual — has scarcely been examined here, and adolescent samples are
all but nonexistent. This narrative review draws on work published between 2010
and 2026, identified through Scopus, Web of Science, PsycINFO, PubMed, and
Google Scholar, to examine how Dark Triad traits and emotional intelligence
(EI) relate to shopping addiction among young people. Two pathways emerge from
the literature. Psychopathy and Machiavellianism both carry built-in EI
deficits and appear to lead to addictive buying by way of poorly regulated
negative affect and mood-repair purchasing that is negatively reinforced over
time — buying to feel better, taken almost literally. Psychopathic
disinhibition contributes something further on top of that. Narcissism travels
a different road, one that largely sidesteps EI and instead runs through
materialism, status consumption, and self-esteem that depends on external
validation. However, the emptiness associated with vulnerable narcissism
occasionally pulls the affective route back into play. Because EI sits at the
center of these pathways and, unlike a personality trait, can be trained, it
looks like the most promising target for prevention efforts.
Adolescent-specific work is thin everywhere, and Indian work on the subject is
essentially absent — a gap that matters given how fast youth consumption in
India has migrated online. We close by considering what this could mean for
school-based EI programs under the National Education Policy 2020.
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Pages:160-165
How to cite this article:
Saurabh Kumar Mishra, Shailendra Kumar Singh "Buying to feel better? dark triad personality and emotional intelligence in adolescent shopping addiction: A narrative review". International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development, Vol 13, Issue 3, 2026, Pages 160-165
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