Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020 Apr;20(2):356-370.
doi: 10.3758/s13415-020-00773-w.

He had it Comin': ERPs Reveal a Facilitation for the Processing of Misfortunes to Antisocial Characters

Affiliations

He had it Comin': ERPs Reveal a Facilitation for the Processing of Misfortunes to Antisocial Characters

Pablo Rodríguez-Gómez et al. Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2020 Apr.

Abstract

Human sociality and prosociality rely on social and moral feelings of empathy, compassion, envy, schadenfreude, as well as on the preference for prosocial over antisocial others. We examined the neural underpinnings of the processing of lexical input designed to tap into these type of social feelings. Brainwave responses from 20 participants were measured as they read sentences comprising a randomly delivered ending outcome (fortunate or unfortunate) to social agents previously profiled as prosocial or antisocial individuals. Fortunate outcomes delivered to prosocial and antisocial agents aimed to tap into empathy and envy/annoying feelings, respectively, whereas unfortunate ones into compassion for prosocial agents and schadenfreude for antisocial ones. ERP modulations in early attention-capture (100-200 ms), semantic fit (400 ms), and late reanalysis processes (600 ms) were analyzed. According to the functional interpretation of each of these event-related electrophysiological effects, we conclude that: 1) a higher capture of attention is initially obtained in response to any type of outcome delivered to a prosocial versus an antisocial agent (frontal P2); 2) a facilitated semantic processing occurs for unfortunate outcomes delivered to antisocial agents (N400); and 3) regardless of the protagonist's social profile, an increased later reevaluation for overall unfortunate versus fortunate outcomes takes place (Late Positive Potential). Thus, neural online measures capture a stepwise unfolding impact of social factors during language comprehension, which include a facilitated processing of misfortunes when they happen to occur to antisocial peers (i.e., schadenfreude).

Keywords: Event-related potentials; Language processing; N400; Prosociality; Schadenfreude.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. J Cogn Neurosci. 2008 Apr;20(4):580-91 - PubMed
    1. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2016 Feb 5;371(1687):20150097 - PubMed
    1. Sci Rep. 2018 Aug 15;8(1):12228 - PubMed
    1. Elife. 2018 Apr 03;7: - PubMed
    1. Sci Rep. 2017 Mar 09;7:44062 - PubMed

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources