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Today's college students are head over heels in love. With themselves.

So argues a group of psychologists in a recent study analyzing a purported shift in generational traits through an unlikely slice of culture: popular song lyrics.

For their study, the researchers used a computer program to analyze the lyrics of the top 10 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for each year from 1980 through 2007. Beginning with the hypothesis that late adolescents and college students have grown steadily more self-absorbed, narcissistic and anti-social, the researchers scanned the song lyrics for uses of first-person singular pronouns, such as "I," "me" and "mine," confirming their predicted increase. At the same time, they observed a correlative downturn in the frequency of first-person plural pronouns ("we," "us," etc.) that "refer to the self in relation to others," and would presumably signify a more communal mindset.

"Over time, songs are becoming more about 'me' and less about 'us,'" said Nathan DeWall, a psychology professor at the University of Kentucky who co-authored the study. "Popular music is a reflection of our cultural values, and right now, there's a high value on liking yourself."

Similarly, they looked for evidence of antisocial behavior in the song lyrics by scanning for words, such as "hate" and "kill," and positive emotion evidenced by words like "love" and "sweet." Controlling for genre to insulate against variables, such as the rising popularity of hip hop music, the researchers found, as they hypothesized, that popular songs have tilted toward anger, hostility and other antisocial tendencies.

The authors acknowledge that the rising level of self-absorption they discovered in popular song lyrics does not have a causal relationship with generational traits. Rather, they argue that as a cultural product, song lyrics reflect a collective shift in attitude well underway.

That should be me

In their analysis, the researchers have drawn on a substantial reservoir of previous psychological work that has made the case through self-response studies that late adolescents and college students are more in love with themselves than ever. For instance, they cite an earlier study that was partly conducted by Jean Twenge, one of the authors of the current article, that identified rising scores in a frequently cited test called the Narcissism Personality Inventory (NPI) over the past three decades.

Twenge, a leading exponent of the thesis that today's young people are more entitled and self-absorbed than any previous generation, has written widely on the subject in academic studies and the books "Generation Me" and "The Narcissism Epidemic," which she co-wrote with W. Keith Campbell, a co-author of the current study appearing in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts.

Enough about you

In explaining the genesis of the current study, DeWall described last summer listening to the alternative band Weezer's 2008 song, "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived," a paean to self-adulation in which front man Rivers Cuomo sings, "I'm the baddest of the bad/I'm the best you've ever had/I'm the tops, I'm the king/All the girls get up when I sing, yeah," before closing with a refrain of the song's title. Even allowing for the irony and sarcasm likely intended, the song indicated to DeWall a troubling generational evolution. "They're marketing this towards an audience who has never loved themselves more," he recalled thinking.

"People don't understand why this is a problem," he said. "Promoting this type of overconfidence where criticism is the enemy is unhealthy. The question is: where does this end? Movies, sitcoms, TV--a lot of this is self-focused. What does this say about us?"

Born this way

To be sure, the claim that narcissism among today's college students has swelled to an unprecedented level is not without its critics, both within the psychological community and among those who work in the field. "I am not fully convinced of the hypothesis," said Martha Merrill, dean of admissions and financial aid at Connecticut College.

"At Connecticut College we attract applicants who are interested in global issues, who volunteer and conduct community service at high levels and are involved in their own schools or communities as student government leaders, artists, athletes, etc.," said Merrill, a member of the network of experts maintained by the higher education website Unigo.

"They care about social issues and effecting change in their communities or in the world," she added. "In addition, I found this year while reading applications, an increasing number of essays from students who recognize they are too plugged in and who attempted to remove themselves from technology and social networks--even if just for a day or a week or longer. This suggests a recognition of the self-absorption to some extent and a desire to break away from the technology for a period of time."

At the same time, Merrill allowed that some students convey the heightened sense of self-involvement that the authors of the study contend has been steadily on the rise over the past three decades. Further, she was careful to parse the authors' broad assertion of the turn inward and how the effects might manifest inside the classroom.

"The authors' claim that students are less and less accepting of criticism does not seem to me to be tied to self-absorption, as much as it does to the sense of entitlement that I have witnessed with some, not all, of today's college students and recent graduates," she said.

While opinions among college students will inevitably run the gamut, and in most cases be the singular product of an individual's personal experience, one student wrapping up her university career expressed disappointment, and a bit of surprise, at the self-involvement she observed among her peers in what she had expected to find a more cosmopolitan environment.

"I think there's a high degree of self-absorption," said Rachel Reclam, a senior at George Washington University who graduates this month.

For Reclam, the authors' thesis of the generational embrace of self is not only plausible, but she sees it as a filter through which her peers react to some of the seismic events in the world around them, making them all about me. And one recent incident left her with a particularly sour taste.

"Like my classmates, when Osama bin Laden was shot, they had just a giant party at the White House. And my reaction to that was frankly embarrassed, because they, like, had a frat party in front the White House when he died. And it just to me showed a real lack of, like, thinking about the world and thinking about the sacrifices that people had made to get us to that point," she said. "If anything, it's a solemn occasion to mark. I mean, the man was a sociopath and he killed 3,000 Americans in cold blood. And they had a party... For people who are supposed to be educated as, like, global citizens, it just struck me as very surprising kind of the lack of thought."

For related coverage from Schools.com see:

• Interview with Dr. Marian Berryhill, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno (video)
• Experimental psychologist salary & career outlook
• How college professors use Facebook (infographic)
• AP/Viacom survey: young adults say education system doesn't understand them