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Objectives The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between pathological narcissism and re-lationship addiction in university students and to look at the sequential mediating effects of distress tolerance and emptiness. Methods For this study, 330 data were analyzed by surveying university students nationwide through a pro-fessional survey institution. The data were analyzed using SPSS Statistics 20.0 and the SPSS PROCESS Macro for descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, and correlation analysis among variables. Additionally, the dual mediation effect was examined, and the significance of the indirect effects was verified using boot-strapping method. Results First, the results show that pathological narcissism, relationship addiction, and emptiness were sig-nificantly positively correlated with each other, and distress tolerance was negatively correlated with all variables. Second, distress tolerance and emptiness mediate the relationship between pathological narcissism and relation-ship addiction, respectively. Third, the sequential mediating effect of distress tolerance and emptiness was sig-nificant in the relationship between pathological narcissism and relationship addiction. Conclusions These results suggest that the higher the pathological narcissism, the lower the distress tolerance, the better the feeling of emptiness, and thus, the more likely it is to fall into relationship addiction. Therefore, it provides information on what interventions can be effective for clients who suffer from relationship addiction problems due to pathological narcissism.
Park et al. (Mon,) studied this question.