Schadenfreude – Entertainment for Men

I’ve never been coy or remorseful in my feelings on revenge. People who’ve done me wrong often occupy my thoughts when the AM minutes and hours are so slowly ticking away, lying in bed next to Heather with Cleo curled up between my legs, it’s either the memories of those I’ve done wrong or others who did me wrong and got away with it, keeping my mind a buzz of noise, images and feelings until I finally get the hang of it and slip away to dreamland. It’s never the people who got what was coming to them, only the open balances still on the books.

Revenge is a concept I was taught to resist growing up, yet as the ledger started filling up it became one of the first aspects of Christian teaching I discarded. Call it a vice, a debilitating condition threatening my acceptance into heaven, whatever you want. Something I learned along the way was that the ghosts that haunt a man’s soul are sometimes laughing, sometimes crying and the rest are brooding in contempt, products of our own creation. You can’t do much about past mistakes besides providing each an honest expression of remorse, and even then it’s up to the victim to provide closure with their forgiveness.

The real beasts are those entrenched memories of people who got the best of you. I can still to this day remember their faces, the words they spoke, how they laughed on the inside and smiled a shitty grin. Revenge though, it’s helped me to clean off a good chunk of that mess, provided comfort and more important than that, confidence. Memories of people who routinely left people like me in their wake without batting an eye, having force fed one of these pathetic fools a slice of humble pie, at times I honestly feel like something could fatally fall out of the sky onto my head and I’d be able to die in peace.

Of course it’s only a trick I’ve taught myself, but it’s worked for a long time. In fact, I can’t honestly say I was ever truly happy until the day finally came when I was able to balance the scales with someone who never expected it. Even better though, was being able to carry something out in a way that left the schmuck wondering ‘who’?

Study: Men Enjoy Seeing Bad People Suffer

By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer

NEW YORK – Bill Clinton said he felt others’ pain. But a new brain-scanning study suggests that when guys see a cheater get a mild electric shock, they don’t feel his pain much at all. In fact, they rather enjoy it.

In contrast, women’s brains showed they do empathize with the cheater’s pain and don’t get a kick out it.

It’s not clear whether this difference in schadenfreude — enjoyment of another’s misfortune — results from basic biology or sex roles learned during life, researchers say. But it could help explain why men have historically taken charge of punishing criminals and others who violate societal rules, said researcher Dr. Klaas Stephan.

Stephan, a senior research fellow at the University College London, is co-author of a study led by Tania Singer at the college and published online Wednesday by the journal Nature.

Singer, in an e-mail message, said the sex difference in results was a surprise and must be confirmed by larger studies. The researchers said women might have reacted like men if the cheater suffered psychological or financial pain instead.

The scientists scanned the brains of 16 men and 16 women after the volunteers played a game with what they thought were other volunteers, but who in fact were actors. The actors either played the game fairly or obviously cheated.

During the brain scans, each volunteer watched as the hands of a “fair” player and a cheater received a mild electrical shock. When it came to the fair-player, both men’s and women’s brains showed activation in pain-related areas, indicating that they empathized with that player’s pain.

But for the cheater, while the women’s brains still showed a response, men’s brains showed virtually no specific reaction. Also, in another brain area associated with feelings of reward, men’s brains showed a greater average response to the cheater’s shock than to the fair player’s shock, while women’s brains did not.

A questionnaire revealed that the men expressed a stronger desire than women did for revenge against the cheater. The more a man said he wanted revenge, the higher his jump in the brain’s reward area when the cheater got a shock. No such correlation showed up in women.

Philip Jackson, who studies brain systems responsible for empathy at the University of Laval in Quebec City in Canada, said he found the sex differences intriguing and worth following up on.

The overall results elegantly tie together “a lot of things we either knew or suspected strongly” about how social interaction can affect the brain’s activity, he said.

___

On the Net:

Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature

Source