This is why you feel happy when someone fails

This is why you feel happy when someone failsThis is why you feel happy when someone failsIn the Pixar animated film Inside Out, most of the plot plays out inside protagonist Rileys head, where five emotions Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger direct her behavior.The film was released to glowing reviews. But director Pete Docter later admitted that he always regretted that one emotion didnt make the cut Schadenfreude.Schadenfreude, which literally means harm joy in German, is the peculiar pleasure people derive from others misfortune.You might feel it when the career of a high-profile celebrity craters, when a particularly noxious criminal is locked up or when a rival sporting gruppe gets vanquished.Psychologists have long struggled with how to best understand, explain and study the emotion It arises in such a wide range of situations that it can seem almost impossible to come up with some sort of unifying framework. Yet thats exactly what my colleagues and I have attempted to do .Schadenfreudes many facesOne challenge continues to plague those who research schadenfreude Theres no agreed-upon definition.Some think its best to study the emotion in the context of social comparison, so theyll tend to focus on the way envy or resentment interacts with schadenfreude.Others view the emotion through the lens of justice and fairness, and whether the sufferer deserved his or her misfortune.Finally, the last group thinks that schadenfreude emerges out of intergroup dynamics members of a group deriving joy out of the suffering of those outside of the group.In ur view, the different definitions point to multiple sides of schadenfreude, each of which might have distinct developmental origins.The blossoming of schadenfreudePerhaps the writers of Inside Out, when deciding to jettison Schadenfreude, thought that it would prove too difficult for children to grasp.Theres evidence, however, that children begin to experience schadenfreude early in life.For example, at four yea rs old, children found someone elses misfortune like tripping and falling into a muddy puddle funnier if that partie had previously done something to hurt other children, such as breaking their toys.Researchers have also found that two-year-old kids primed to be jealous of a peer experience glee when that peer suffers a mishap. By the age of seven, children feel more pleased after winning a game if a rival lost than when both won the game.Finally, in a 2013 study, researchers had nine-month-old infants observe puppets interacting with one another. Some puppets enjoyed the same types of food that the infants enjoyed, while others had a different set of tastes. When some puppets harmed the other puppets, the researchers discovered that the infants would rather see the puppets who didnt share their tastes be hurt over the ones who did share their tastes.Bringing it all togetherTogether, these studies show that schadenfreude is a complex emotion that seems to be deeply ingrained in th e human condition.Psychologists Scott Lilienfeld, Philippe Rochat and I wondered if there could be a way to unite the multiple facets of schadenfreude under the same umbrella.Eventually, we settled on seeing schadenfreude as a form of dehumanization the act of depicting and viewing another person as less than human.When most people hear the term dehumanization, they probably go to the worst-case scenario a complete denial of someones humanity, a phenomenon relegated to torture chambers, battlefields and racist propaganda.But this is a misconception. Psychologists have shown that people often view their own group in more human terms, and in subtle ways can deny the full humanity of those outside of their group.In our review, we hypothesized that the more empathy someone feels toward another person, the less likely they are to experience schadenfreude when that person suffers.So in order for someone to feel schadenfreude toward another person whether its a rival, someone in an out group or someone whos committed a crime theyll need to subtly dehumanize them. Only then does the sufferers misfortune become rewarding.This theory hasnt been tested yet, so at the end of our review, we suggest ways schadenfreudes early origins and individual differences can be placed under scientific scrutiny to study this novel hypothesis.Linking schadenfreude with dehumanization might sound dark, especially because schadenfreude is such a universal emotion. But dehumanization occurs more often than most would like to think and we believe its behind the pang of pleasure you feel when you see someone fail.Shensheng Wang, Ph.D. Candidate in Psychology, Emory UniversityThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.