Schadenfreude: {shah-din-froy-duh} (n.) pleasure derived from the misfortune of others.
- from the Middle High German words Schade (damage, harm) and Vreude (joy)
As you know, since the mid-1990’s America has had an ongoing and increasingly passionate love affair with “Reality” Television. This love affair really stems from the physiological response documented in a landmark study. Just thought this was fascinating and decided to share it. I’ll leave it up to you to pass moral judgment. Peace.
A New York Times article in 2002 cited a number of scientific studies of schadenfreude, which it defined as “delighting in others’ misfortune.” Many such studies are based on social comparison theory, the idea that when people around us have bad luck, we look better to ourselves. Other researchers have found that people with low self-esteem are more likely to feel schadenfreude than are people who have high self-esteem.
- Warren St. John article
A 2006 experiment suggests that men, but not women, enjoy seeing “bad” people suffer. The study was designed to measure empathy, by watching which brain centers are stimulated when subjects inside an fMRI observe someone having a painful experience. Researchers expected that the brain’s empathy center would show more stimulation when those seen as “good” got an electric shock than they would if the shock was given to someone the subject had reason to consider bad. This was indeed the case, but for male subjects the brain’s pleasure centers also lit up when someone else got a shock that the male thought was well-deserved.
- Singer T, Seymour B, O’Doherty JP, Stephan KE, Dolan RJ, Frith CD (January 2006). “Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others”. Nature 439 (7075): 466–9. study
Brain-scanning studies show that schadenfreude is correlated with envy. Strong feelings of envy activated physical pain nodes in the brain’s dorsal anterior cingulate cortex; the brain’s reward centers (e.g. the ventral striatum) were activated by news that the people envied had suffered misfortune. The magnitude of the brain’s schadenfreude response could even be predicted from the strength of the previous envy response.
