Abstract
In this short commentary we argue that feelings of contempt play a major role in schadenfreude (joy in the misfortunes of others) and “reverse schadenfreude”—gluckschmerz (sadness at the fortunes of others). We used qualitative mixed-mode comparative analysis of the major characteristics/features of negative sentiments, to explore a possible link between contempt and schadenfreude and gluckschmerz. Findings, especially from the political partisan polarization literature have shown that the investigated sentiments share many of their important characteristics, suggesting a possible relationship in the form of higher level of contempt possibly triggering a higher level of schadenfreude and gluckschmerz.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abelson, R. P., Kinder, D. R., Peters, M. D., & Fiske, S. T. (1982). Affective and semantic components in political person perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42(4), 619.
Bell, M. (2013). Hard feelings: The moral psychology of contempt. Oxford University Press.
Brader, T., & Marcus, G. E. (2013). Emotion and political psychology. In L. Huddy, D. O. Sears, & J. S. Levy (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of political psychology (pp. 165–204). Oxford University Press.
Cikara, M., Bruneau, E. G., van Bavel, J. J., & Saxe, R. (2014). Their pain gives us pleasure: How intergroup dynamics shape empathic failure and counter-empathic responses. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 55, 110–128.
Combs, D. J., Powell, C. A., Schurtz, D. R., & Smith, R. H. (2009). Politics, schadenfreude, and ingroup identification: The sometimes happy thing about a poor economy and death. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(4), 635–646.
Crysel, L. C., & Webster, G. D. (2018). Schadenfreude and the spread of political misfortune. PLoS ONE, 13(9), e0201754.
DeLeeuw, E. D. (2018). Mixed-mode: Past, present, and future. Survey Research Methods, 12(2), 75–88.
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1986). A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion. Motivation and Emotion, 10(2), 159–168.
Feather, N. T. (2012). Tall poppies, deservingness and schadenfreude. The Psychologist, 25(6), 434–437.
Gervais, M. M., & Fessler, D. M. T. (2017). On the deep structure of social affect: Attitudes, emotions, sentiments, and the case of “contempt.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40, e225.
Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. Wiley.
Haidt, J., & Keltner, D. (1999). Culture and facial expression: Open ended methods find more faces and a gradient of universality. Cognition and Emotion, 13(3), 225–266.
Hareli, S., & Weiner, B. (2002). Social emotions and personality inferences: A scaffold for a new direction in the study of achievement motivation. Educational Psychologist, 37(3), 183–193.
Hess, U. (2018). Why are schadenfreude and gluckschmerz not happiness or anger? Or are they? Emotion Review, 10, 306–308.
Hoogland, C. E., Schurtz, D. R., Cooper, C. M., Combs, D. J., Brown, E. G., & Smith, R. H. (2015). The joy of pain and the pain of joy: In-group identification predicts schadenfreude and gluckschmerz following rival groups’ fortunes. Motivation and Emotion, 39, 1–22.
Hornik, J. (2018). Gloating in word-of-mouth communication. Innovations in Management, 22(2), 106–115.
Hornik, J., Satchi, R. S., Cesareo, L., & Pastore, A. (2015). Information dissemination via electronic word-of-mouth: Good news travels fast, bad news travels faster! Computers in Human Behavior, 45, 273–280.
Hornik, J., Satchi, R. S., & Rachamim, M. (2019). The joy of pain: A gloating account of negative electronic word-of-mouth communication following an organizational setback. Internet Research, 29(1), 82–103.
Keltner, D., Sauter, D., & Tracy, J. (2019). Emotional expression: Advances in basic emotion theory. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 43(2), 1–28.
Larsen, J. T., & McGraw, A. P. (2011). Further evidence for mixed emotions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(6), 1095.
Levenson, R. W. (2011). Basic emotion questions. Emotion Review, 3(4), 379–386.
Massin, O. (2018). Bitter joys and sweet sorrows. In C. Tappolet, F. Teroni, & A. K. Ziv (Eds.), Shadows of the soul: Philosophical perspectives on negative emotions (pp. 50–59). Routledge.
Mattes, K., Roseman, I. J., Redlawsk, D. P., & Katz, S. (2018). Contempt and anger in the 2016 US presidential election. In J. C. Lucas, C. J. Galdieri & Ts. S. Sisco (Eds.) Conventional wisdom, parties, and broken barriers in the 2016 election (pp. 101–114). Lexington Books.
Nai, A., & Otto, L. P. (2021). When they go low, we gloat: How trait and state Schadenfreude moderate the perception and effect of negative political messages. Journal of Media Psychology, 33(2), 82–93.
Peterson, E., & Kagalwala, A. (2021). When unfamiliarity breeds contempt: How partisan selective exposure sustains oppositional media hostility. American Political Science Review, 115(2), 585–598.
Roseman, I. J., & Steele, A. K. (2018). Concluding commentary: Schadenfreude, gluckschmerz, jealousy, and hate—What (and when, and why) are the Emotions? Emotion Review, 10(4), 327–340.
Rudolph, U., Schulz, K., & Tscharaktschiew, N. (2013). Moral emotions: An analysis guided by Heider’s naive action analysis. International Journal of Advances in Psychology, 2(2), 69–92.
Russell, J. A. (1991). The contempt expression and the relativity thesis. Motivation and Emotion, 15, 149–168.
Scherer, K. R., & Moors, A. (2019). The emotion process: Event appraisal and component differentiation. Annual Review of Psychology, 70, 719–745.
Smith, R. H., & van Dijk, W. W. (2018). Schadenfreude and gluckschmerz. Emotion Review, 10, 293–304.
Sundie, J. M., Ward, J., Beal, D. J., Chin, W. W., & Oneto, S. (2009). Schadenfreude as a consumption-related emotion: Feeling happiness about the downfall of another’s product. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 19, 356–373.
Van Dijk, W. W., Ouwerkerk, J. W., Goslinga, S., Nieweg, M., & Gallucci, M. (2006). When people fall from grace: Reconsidering the role of envy in schadenfreude. Emotion, 6(1), 156–164.
Van Dijk, W. W., & Smith, R. H. (2019). More about when bad news arrives and good news strikes. Emotion Review, 11(3), 262–264.
Vogt, W. P., Gardner, D. C., Haeffele, L. M., & Vogt, E. R. (2014). Selecting the right analyses for your data: Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. Guilford Publications.
Webster, S. W., Glynn, A. N., & Motta, M. P. (2021). Partisan schadenfreude and the demand for candidate cruelty. Unpublished manuscript.
Wagner, H. L. (2000). The accessibility of the term “contempt” and the meaning of the unilateral lip curl. Cognition and Emotion, 14(5), 689–710.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Appendix
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hornik, J., Rachamim, M. & Grossman, O. Ripples of contempt: aversive responses to others (mis)fortunes. Motiv Emot 45, 809–817 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-021-09905-2
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-021-09905-2