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Corticostriatal signatures of schadenfreude: evidence from Huntington's disease

Sandra Baez1,2,3,4, Mariana Pino5, Mildred Berrío5

  • 1Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive and Translational Neuroscience (INCyT), INECO Foundation, Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry
|August 3, 2017
PubMed

Insights

Patients with Huntington's disease (HD) experience less schadenfreude, a pleasure in others' misfortune. This reduction is linked to brain atrophy in reward and mentalizing regions, impacting social emotions.

Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Social Psychology
  • Clinical Neurology

Background:

  • Schadenfreude, a complex social emotion, involves reward processing and mentalizing.
  • Huntington's disease (HD) patients show reduced schadenfreude, suggesting striatal degeneration's role.
  • The direct link between HD-related brain atrophy and schadenfreude deficits remains uninvestigated.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the correlation between grey matter (GM) atrophy in HD patients and their schadenfreude ratings.
  • To compare schadenfreude and envy experiences between HD patients and controls.
  • To identify specific brain regions where atrophy is associated with impaired schadenfreude in HD.

Main Methods:

  • Compared schadenfreude and envy ratings in 20 HD patients and 23 controls using an experimental task.
  • Assessed grey matter (GM) volume differences between the HD patient group and the control group.
  • Correlated regional brain atrophy with schadenfreude impairments in HD patients.

Main Results:

  • HD patients reported significantly lower schadenfreude compared to controls.
  • Envy ratings were comparable between HD patients and controls.
  • Reduced schadenfreude in HD patients correlated with atrophy in the ventral striatum (reward system) and precuneus/superior parietal lobule (mentalizing network).

Conclusions:

  • Striatal and mentalizing network atrophy in HD patients underlies deficits in experiencing schadenfreude.
  • Highlights the interconnectedness of reward processing and socioemotional functions in schadenfreude.
  • Provides novel neural correlates for schadenfreude, implicating specific brain regions in its processing.

Keywords:
envygray matter atrophysocial emotionsventral striatum

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