Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude (; ; 'harm-joy') is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another. It is a borrowed word from German, with no direct translation, that originated in the 18th century.

Schadenfreude has been detected in children as young as 24 months and may be an important social emotion establishing " inequity aversion".

Etymology

Schadenfreude is a term borrowed from German. It is a compound of ("damage/harm") and ("joy"). The German word was first mentioned in English texts in 1852 and 1867, and first used in English running text in 1895. In German, it was first attested in the 1740s.
The earliest seems to be Christoph Starke, Synopsis bibliothecae exegeticae in Vetus Testamentum. Leipzig 1750.
Although common nouns normally are not capitalised in English, schadenfreude sometimes is capitalised following the German convention.

Psychological causes

Researchers have found that there are three driving forces behind schadenfreude – aggression, rivalry, and justice.

Self-esteem has a negative relationship with the frequency and intensity of schadenfreude experienced by an individual; individuals with less self-esteem tend to experience schadenfreude more frequently and intensely.

It is hypothesized that this inverse relationship is mediated through the human psychological inclination to define and protect their self- and in-group- identity or self-conception. Specifically, for someone with high self-esteem, seeing another person fail may still bring them a small (but effectively negligible) surge of confidence because the observer's high self-esteem significantly lowers the threat they believe the visibly-failing human poses to their status or identity. Since this confident individual perceives that, regardless of circumstances, the successes and failures of the other person will have little impact on their own status or well-being, they have very little emotional investment in how the other person fares, be it positive or negative.

Conversely, for someone with low self-esteem, someone who is more successful poses a threat to their sense of self, and seeing this person fall can be a source of comfort because they perceive a relative improvement in their internal or in-group standing.

* Aggression-based schadenfreude primarily involves group identity. The joy of observing the suffering of others comes from the observer's feeling that the other's failure represents an improvement or validation of their own group's (in-group) status in relation to external (out-groups) groups (see In-group and out-group). This is, essentially, schadenfreude based on group versus group status.
*Rivalry-based schadenfreude is individualistic and related to interpersonal competition. It arises from a desire to stand out from and out-perform one's peers. This is schadenfreude based on another person's misfortune eliciting pleasure because the observer now feels better about their personal identity and self-worth, instead of their group identity.
*Justice-based schadenfreude comes from seeing that behavior seen as immoral or "bad" is punished. It is the pleasure associated with seeing a "bad" person being harmed or receiving retribution. ''Schadenfreude'' is experienced here because it makes people feel that fairness has been restored for a previously un-punished wrong, and is a type of moral emotion.

Synonyms

''Schadenfreude'' has equivalents in many other languages (such as: in Dutch and Swedish ), but no commonly-used precise English single-word equivalent. There are other ways to express the concept in English.

''Epicaricacy'' is a seldom-used direct equivalent, borrowed from Greek ''epichairekakia'' (ἐπιχαιρεκακία, first attested in Aristotle) from ἐπί ''epi'' 'upon', χαρά ''chara'' 'joy', and κακόν ''kakon'' 'evil'.

Tall poppy syndrome is a cultural phenomenon where people of high status are resented, attacked, cut down, or criticized because they have been classified as better than their peers. This is similar to "begrudgery", the resentment or envy of the success of a peer. If someone were to feel joy by the victim's fall from grace, they would be experiencing schadenfreude.

''Roman holiday'' is a metaphor from Byron's poem '' Childe Harold's Pilgrimage'', where a gladiator in ancient Rome expects to be "butchered to make a Roman holiday" while the audience would take pleasure from watching his suffering. The term suggests debauchery and disorder in addition to sadistic enjoyment.

Morose delectation ( la, delectatio morosa), meaning "the habit of dwelling with enjoyment on evil thoughts", was considered by the medieval church to be a sin. French writer Pierre Klossowski maintained that the appeal of sadism is morose delectation.

"Gloating" is an English word of similar meaning, where "gloat