Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 6, 2026
05:42
The Forced Swim Test as a Model of Depressive-like Behavior
Published on: March 2, 2015
39.0K
Daniel has fallen into a muddy puddle--schadenfreude or sympathy?
Katrin Schulz1, Almut Rudolph, Nadine Tscharaktschiew
1Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany.
The British Journal of Developmental Psychology
|October 17, 2013
Summary
Children as young as 4 understand schadenfreude and sympathy, with reactions to misfortune influenced by the moral intentions of others. These emotions mediate helping behavior, especially in older children.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Moral Psychology
- Social-Emotional Learning
Background:
- Schadenfreude, the pleasure derived from another's misfortune, is a complex emotion with debated developmental origins.
- Understanding children's capacity for schadenfreude and its relation to prosocial behaviors is crucial for social development research.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the emergence and developmental trajectory of schadenfreude in children aged 4 to 8.
- To examine how the moral valence of a target's goal influences children's schadenfreude, sympathy, and helping behavior.
- To explore the mediating roles of schadenfreude and sympathy in the relationship between goal valence and helping behavior.
Main Methods:
- One hundred children aged 4 to 8 years participated in the study.
- Participants listened to stories depicting a child experiencing misfortune after pursuing either a morally positive or morally negative goal.
- Assessed participants' schadenfreude, sympathy, and willingness to help the child in the story.
Main Results:
- Children as young as 4 years old demonstrated emotional and behavioral responses to misfortune that were contingent on the moral valence of the other child's goal.
- Negative moral goals led to decreased helping behavior, while positive moral goals increased helping behavior.
- Mediation analyses indicated that both schadenfreude and sympathy significantly mediated the link between goal valence and helping behavior, with stronger effects observed in older children.
Conclusions:
- Children's understanding of morality influences their emotional and behavioral responses to others' misfortunes from an early age.
- Schadenfreude and sympathy are key emotional mediators that shape children's prosocial behavior in response to perceived injustice or misfortune.
- The findings highlight the developmental interplay between moral reasoning, emotional responses, and prosocial behavior in childhood.
More Related Videos
09:53Humor or Rationality? The Neural Mechanisms of How Agent Type and Language Style Influence Satisfaction with Ride-Hailing Service Failure Recovery
Published on: March 13, 2026
134
08:00Analyzing Spatial Learning and Prosocial Behavior in Mice Using the Barnes Maze and Damsel-in-Distress Paradigms
Published on: November 17, 2018
14.0K
Related Concept Videos
01:04Social Facilitation
29.0K
Not all intergroup interactions lead to negative outcomes. Sometimes, being in a group situation can improve performance. Social facilitation occurs when an individual performs better when an audience is watching than when the individual performs the behavior alone. This typically occurs when people are performing a task for which they are skilled.
29.0K
01:14Fundamental Attribution Error
12.8K
According to some social psychologists, people tend to overemphasize internal factors as explanations—or attributions—for the behavior of other people. They tend to assume that the behavior of another person is a trait of that person, and to underestimate the power of the situation on the behavior of others. They tend to fail to recognize when the behavior of another is due to situational variables, and thus to the person’s state. This erroneous assumption is...
12.8K
01:41Social Traps
20.5K
Social traps are negative situations where people get caught in a direction or relationship that later proves to be unpleasant, with no easy way to back out of or avoid. The concept was orignally introduced by John Platt who applied psychology to Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons", where in New England herd owners could let their cattle graze in the common ground. This situation seems like a good idea, but an individual could have an advantage. If they owned...
20.5K
01:38Cognitive Dissonance
29.1K
Social psychologists have documented that feeling good about ourselves and maintaining positive self-esteem is a powerful motivator of human behavior (Tavris & Aronson, 2008). In the United States, members of the predominant culture typically think very highly of themselves and view themselves as good people who are above average on many desirable traits (Ehrlinger, Gilovich, & Ross, 2005). Often, our behavior, attitudes, and beliefs are affected when we experience a threat to our...
29.1K
00:57Deindividuation
22.4K
Deindividuation is a form of social influence on an individual’s behavior such that the individual engages in unusual or non-normal behavior while in a group setting. Why? Because in these group settings, the individual no longer sees themselves as an individual anymore, disinhibiting their behavior and personal restraint.
22.4K
04:49Robbers Cave
13.6K
During the 1950s, the landmark Robbers Cave experiment demonstrated that when groups must compete with one another, intergroup conflict, hostility, and even violence may result. At the Oklahoman summer camp, two troops of boys—termed the Rattlers and the Eagles—took part in a week-long tournament. During this time, their negativity culminated in derogatory name-calling, fistfights, and even vandalism and destruction of property. However, this work also revealed that such tension...
13.6K