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Stereotypes and Schadenfreude: Affective and physiological markers of pleasure at outgroup misfortunes.

ABSTRACT: People often fail to empathize with outgroup members, and sometimes even experience Schadenfreude-pleasure-in response to their misfortunes. One potent predictor of Schadenfreude is envy. According to the Stereotype Content Model, envy is elicited by groups whose stereotypes comprise status and competitiveness. These are the first studies to investigate whether stereotypes are sufficient to elicit pleasure in response to high-status, competitive targets' misfortunes. Study 1 participants feel least negative when misfortunes befall high-status, competitive targets as compared to other social targets; participants' facial muscles simultaneously exhibit a pattern consistent with positive affect (i.e., smiling). Study 2 attenuates the Schadenfreude response by manipulating status and competition-relevant information; Schadenfreude decreases when the target-group member has lowered status or is cooperative. Stereotypes' specific content, and not just individual relationships with targets themselves, can predict Schadenfreude.

SUBMITTER: Cikara M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3887033 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Stereotypes and Schadenfreude: Affective and physiological markers of pleasure at outgroup misfortunes.

Cikara Mina M Fiske Susan T ST

Social psychological and personality science 20120101 1

People often fail to empathize with outgroup members, and sometimes even experience <i>Schadenfreude</i>-pleasure-in response to their misfortunes. One potent predictor of Schadenfreude is envy. According to the Stereotype Content Model, envy is elicited by groups whose stereotypes comprise status and competitiveness. These are the first studies to investigate whether stereotypes are sufficient to elicit pleasure in response to high-status, competitive targets' misfortunes. Study 1 participants ...[more]

PMID: 24416471

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Project description:BackgroundAffective responses are increasingly recognized as potentially effective intervention targets that may facilitate exercise and physical activity behavior change. While emerging correlational evidence suggests that more pleasant affective responses are associated with higher participation and adherence, experimental evidence remains scarce. In light of this, we conducted a preregistered, pragmatic, single-blinded, superiority randomized controlled trial with two parallel groups, with the goal of determining the impact of an individualized exercise-intensity prescription targeting pleasure on exercise frequency.MethodsForty-seven non-regular exercisers were randomized into two groups. For both groups, the intervention consisted of three exercise sessions based on the Frequency-Intensity-Time-Type (FITT) principle. However, the experimental group also received an individualized intensity prescription based on prior assessment of preference for and tolerance of exercise intensity, as well as instructions emphasizing the promotion of pleasure as a basis for self-regulating exercise intensity. The primary outcome was gymnasium attendance over an eight-week follow-up period. Secondary outcomes were affective valence and arousal, post-exercise enjoyment, core affective exercise experiences, and anticipated and remembered affect.ResultsForty-six participants were retained for analysis (Mage = 32.00; SD = 8.62 years; 56.5% female). Compared to the control group, the experimental group exhibited 77% higher session attendance (14.35 vs. 8.13 sessions) over the eight-week follow-up period (group main effect p = .018, η2p = .120; Cohen's d ranged from 0.28 to 0.91 during follow-up). Also, the experimental group reported higher levels of pleasure during the intervention sessions (for all group main effects, p < .001, η2p from .33 to .37) and higher levels of remembered pleasure (group main effect p = .021, η2p = .116) and anticipated pleasure (group main effect p = .022, η2p = .114). No harm was detected.ConclusionsThese results demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of an intervention aimed at enhancing affective responses to exercise in improving short-term session attendance.Trial registrationClinicalTrial.gov NCT05416593.

Project description:Affective computing through physiological signals monitoring is currently a hot topic in the scientific literature, but also in the industry. Many wearable devices are being developed for health or wellness tracking during daily life or sports activity. Likewise, other applications are being proposed for the early detection of risk situations involving sexual or violent aggressions, with the identification of panic or fear emotions. The use of other sources of information, such as video or audio signals will make multimodal affective computing a more powerful tool for emotion classification, improving the detection capability. There are other biological elements that have not been explored yet and that could provide additional information to better disentangle negative emotions, such as fear or panic. Catecholamines are hormones produced by the adrenal glands, two small glands located above the kidneys. These hormones are released in the body in response to physical or emotional stress. The main catecholamines, namely adrenaline, noradrenaline and dopamine have been analysed, as well as four physiological variables: skin temperature, electrodermal activity, blood volume pulse (to calculate heart rate activity. i.e., beats per minute) and respiration rate. This work presents a comparison of the results provided by the analysis of physiological signals in reference to catecholamine, from an experimental task with 21 female volunteers receiving audiovisual stimuli through an immersive environment in virtual reality. Artificial intelligence algorithms for fear classification with physiological variables and plasma catecholamine concentration levels have been proposed and tested. The best results have been obtained with the features extracted from the physiological variables. Adding catecholamine's maximum variation during the five minutes after the video clip visualization, as well as adding the five measurements (1-min interval) of these levels, are not providing better performance in the classifiers.

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Stereotypes and Schadenfreude: Affective and physiological markers of pleasure at outgroup misfortunes.

Publications

Stereotypes and Schadenfreude: Affective and physiological markers of pleasure at outgroup misfortunes.

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