Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University and co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement believes young people are becoming increasingly narcissistic.

"Overall, we've seen a massive increase in narcissism among college students" she told the American Psychological Association's Monitor on Psychology. The financial crisis may have dampened down materialism but "a lot of other cultural forces — the internet and parenting in particular — are still pushing in the direction of narcissism," she said.

Lisa Firestone highlights the role of parenting in the book she has written with her psychologist father, Robert Firestone, The Self Under Siege. "Vanity is a fantasised image of the self that is formed when parents substitute empty praise and a false build-up for the real love and acknowledgment they have failed to provide to their child," she says.

"Studies have shown that children offered compliments for skills they haven't mastered or talents they do not possess are left feeling as if they'd received no praise at all, often even emptier and less secure," she wrote in Psychology Today. "Only children praised for real accomplishments were able to build self-esteem. The others were left to develop something far less desirable — narcissism."

These arguments have found resonance in Australia where the question of whether young people today are more narcissistic than previous generations is a topic of debate.

Professor Johanna Wyn, director of the Australian Youth Research Centre at Melbourne University, has been conducting research through the Life Patterns project following two generations of Australians, Gen X born in 1973 and Gen Y born around 1989, in areas such as education, employment, health and family as well as learning about their aspirations and attitudes.

Wyn says she rejects the narcissistic label given to young people in Australia today.

"Jean Twenge can't speak for Australians" she says. "I don't see anything like that in the data we've got and we've been researching Generation X for over 22 years," she says. Young people today "have to be really good decision makers, they have to be self-aware and they have to be good navigators of complex times and I think you could be reading some of those traits as somehow being narcissistic because they have to be fairly aware of where they stand, who they are, how they connect, but I see it as a functional and probably inevitable way of operating."