Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude

After watching “Boston Legal,” I learned a vocabulary: Schadenfreude. It is a German expression derived from “Schaden” meaning damage, and “Freude” meaning joy. In layman’s terms, it is "pleasure taken from someone else's misfortune" or "shameful joy." Some people contend: it is human nature. It is an unfortunate emotion which seemingly brings satisfaction when people see that the “mighty have fallen.”

Ostensibly, science corroborates such emotion. John Roach, a reporter for National Geographic News, writes: "The team scanned the brain activity of male volunteers participating in a game of exchanging money back and forth. If one player made a selfish choice instead of a mutually beneficial one, another player could penalize him. The study, co-authored by Ernst Fehr who is the director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, suppose: "People seem to trade off the expected satisfaction from punishing with the cost of punishing in quite a rational way."

In the anatomical point of view, Dominique de Quervain, a neuroscientist at the University of Zurich and co-author suggests: “Deficits in prefrontal cortical functioning may contribute to these psychopathologies by a disturbed ability to weigh beneficial against negative consequences of an action.” The scientist measured the blood flow in the brain using positron emission tomography (PET). This seems to surely corroborate that Schadenfreude is a valid human emotion. Although unfortunate, and sadistic in a sense, it is, arguably, one of the emotions that make people human.

On a final note, it would seem that Schadenfreude is a coping mechanism. It can be one of the many reminders that all things have to come to an end. Moreover, it might also bring hope to people who are at the lowest point in their lives. Some people might be saying: “Everything can change. Everything must change. The mighty have fallen. Now, it can be my time.”




Work Cited:
National Geographic
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