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Schadenfreude and Gloating: Localized?

Brain lesions affect the ability to recognize envy and gloating.

Some evidence suggests that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex plays a role in recognizing social competitive emotions. To explore its role in envy and gloating, researchers used simple cognitive and affective tasks, based on cartoons used in child psychology, to compare ability to recognize the emotions of others. Subjects were 48 patients with brain lesions in different locations (ventromedial, dorsolateral, mixed, superior parietal, inferior parietal, and mesial temporal) and 35 healthy controls. Envy was considered negative (the person experiencing it feels bad), and gloating was considered positive (the person experiencing it feels good).

Patients with right ventromedial lesions had difficulty recognizing both envy and gloating. Lesions in the inferior parietal lobule and in the left hemisphere were associated with greater difficulty in recognizing gloating, whereas lesions in the right hemisphere were associated with greater difficulty in recognizing envy. The authors conclude that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is implicated in decoding these emotions in others and infer that these findings yet again demonstrate the role of the ventromedial cortex in "theory of mind" (awareness of others’ beliefs and thoughts).

Comment: The authors carefully selected brain-damaged patients to help answer interesting questions about brain function. The tasks were necessarily simplified, which afforded tight experimental control but risked sacrificing ecological validity. The results discriminate among lesion locations, giving clues about the processing of positive and negative emotions, and confirm other findings about the role of the ventromedial cortex in empathy and mind reading.

This highly original study sheds light on an important human quality. Gloating is an emotion that most humans find exquisitely shameful: taking pleasure at another’s misfortune. Its name in German is chilling (schadenfreude), but other languages also pick out this human emotion (Hebrew apparently has a similar word, "simcha la’ed"). We might also associate it with sociopathic tendencies — and yet it is normative.

— Simon Baron-Cohen, PhD, MPhil

Dr. Baron-Cohen is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology and Director, Autism Research Centre, Cambridge University, UK.

Published in Journal Watch Neurology November 27, 2007

Citation(s):

Shamay-Tsoory SG et al. The green-eyed monster and malicious joy: The neuroanatomical bases of envy and gloating (schadenfreude). Brain 2007 Jun; 130:1663.

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