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If you ever catch yourself grumbling about teenagers these days, steamed at how much more entitled they seem than previous generations, look out: Your curmudgeon is showing.

According to new research, teens and young adults are no more narcissistic or self-aggrandizing today than they were three decades ago. Instead, all those overconfident, egotistical kids demanding instant jobs and fame may be a figment of aging imaginations.

"There is a lot of talk about how different this generation is from other generations, in a very negative light," says Kali Trzesniewski, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario in London and lead author of the study.

In fact, she says, it's not them - it's us.

"We just have a tendency to view younger generations in a negative way. Part of it is we change as we get older - we see the world differently."

Dr. Trzesniewski's research, published in the February issue of the journal Psychological Science, was conceived in response to both popular perceptions and the work of others in her field, most notably that of U.S. psychologist Jean Twenge, author of Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - and More Miserable Than Ever Before.

Dr. Trzesniewski and her colleagues from the United States sifted through two sets of questionnaires for their data, covering people aged 17 to 24. They looked for evidence of personalities within the normal - albeit still potentially irritating - range of narcissism.

They found the number of people who tend to think they're better than others and entitled to more than others is not on the rise, Dr. Trzesniewski says.

What's more, by some measures, teenagers and young people are actually displaying more of the positive expressions of narcissism, such as self-sufficiency, she found.

The study is a welcome development for those seeking to better understand young people.

"It questions the knee-jerk assumption that the current generation of young people is the worst in history," says Rex Kay, a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst at the University of Toronto, who was not involved with the study.

For the first part of the study, the researchers compared scores on a test called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, which psychiatrists and psychologists use to assess personality traits associated with narcissistic personality disorder. Introductory psychology students routinely take the test as part of their college studies.

The team zeroed in on tests done by more than 25,000 students at the University of California since the late 1970s. Dr. Trzesniewski and her co-authors identified California as the place where teens would potentially exhibit the most narcissism, thanks to EST, the self-help Erhard Seminars Training movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and various government-funded self-esteem educational programs in that state in the 1980s.

On average, the young people responded to 15 out of 40 items - such as choosing between two statements: a) "I am going to be a great person" and b) "I hope I am going to be successful" - in a narcissistic way, a figure consistent throughout the generations.

"On average, people are pretty normal," she says.

The second part of the research was gleaned from more than 400,000 replies to a questionnaire called Monitoring the Future, which are conducted annually as part of a large, continuing U.S. study of high-school students. Dr. Trzesniewski looked for the answers that suggested kids held unrealistically positive beliefs about themselves. Again, she found no major changes since 1976.

Except, that is, in the mix of traits under the umbrella of narcissism. While the changes in effect cancel each other out, she did find a decrease in socially toxic traits, such as superiority, and a rise in relatively benign traits, such as self-sufficiency.

"In that sense, overall narcissism isn't changing but there are some changes. But those don't seem that bad. Sometimes they just describe your basic [chief executive officer]. It's not necessarily always a terrible thing," Dr. Trzesniewski says.

While Dr. Kay agrees with the conclusion of the current study, he says there are some more nuanced narcissism-related problems cropping up in the adolescents and young adults he treats. He uses the term "narcissistic vulnerability" to characterize what he sees as an increasingly common psychological response to the stress and fears of modern life.

He says it starts with the feeling that life is a house of cards that can topple at any minute. One outcome, he says, is "that more aggressive, grandiose narcissism we all hate."

Even if it's not showing up in social studies, he says, it's an area of concern.

"I'm seeing a lot of fragility," he says. "And people may deal with that fragility by retreating, closing down, by not running the risks of being an adult in the world. I also see it by people pushing themselves forward aggressively but with a lot of fear - fear that it's all going to crumble."