 Something people have been talking about a lot at the moment is the idea of a narcissism epidemic or a culture of entitlement that we're living in. So this is the idea that narcissism is growing over time. This really came about after a study was done a few years ago in America where they looked at college students and measured their narcissism every year that the college students entered university and found that it was getting larger over time. So this really raised some concerns about you know what's going on with narcissism in the world at the moment. However this research was in the United States so we have a lot of questions about what's actually happening in New Zealand as we have quite a different culture to America. It also raises an interesting question beyond the cultural difference right. The increase in narcissism in student population over the years it could be just an increase in narcissism based on cohorts or it might actually be a developmental effect where but people in general might tend to increase in narcissism in younger age that is the college years and so this is part of the reason we all started what wanted to look at development of narcissism in New Zealand. So this is a really difficult question to answer and a lot of studies in this area have used the cohort data so measuring different groups of people across time and the really cool thing about the NZ ABS is that we have waves of data with the same people and we're tracking them over time so we can actually start to answer this question about you know is narcissism getting worse and is it to do with age or is it to do with cohorts and generations. Exactly so the NZ ABS has a really cool feature in that it does follow the same well what we call a panel design it follows the same people over time year after year and the fact that these people are heterogeneous in terms of they're all of different ages we are representative of the population so we have people who are 18, 19, 20 and we have people who are 40, 45, 60 and onwards we're actually able to model what we call latent growth curve models that tell us our developmental or change trajectory over the seven years but we're able to base it on people's age rather than time per se so we can actually estimate a pattern of change in narcissism that represents the life spent from 18 through to 80 years old. Oh and else you showed strong evidence for a developmental pattern basically as people age their narcissism goes down and this is in contrast to the results that we saw a few years ago in America. Exactly so some of the previous findings showing that narcissism may increase might actually indicate what we call a cohort effect that students from 10 years ago may have had lower narcissism in students 10 years into the future or now. What we are showing is that whilst younger people do have higher levels of narcissism to begin with the narcissism does change quite consistently across the lifespan and that it does decrease pretty steadily through into older age. So if we took a group of 18-year-olds now they might actually have reasonably high narcissism compared to older people but if we follow them over time it is naturally going to decrease as people age and as they mature. And the really cool thing is that we are actually showing the narcissism does change as people grow older you're not just stuck with it. Now the big question for the future is firstly how narcissism changes over a longer period. We have seven years but I mean seven years in terms of a lifespan is not that much. Another question we want to look at is group differences in development over a longer period and the only way obviously we are able to do these sorts of analyses and answer these sorts of questions is because of the nature the longitudinal nature of the answer to AVS and that our participants respond every year to our questions so that we can answer some of these fundamental issues. And thank you to our participants who take the time and take part because it lets us answer these really big questions are really cool questions as well.