In the second part, participants are told that the person they have just encountered experience an unfortunate event (e.g., the person does not win the subsequent lottery). This manipulation is used as the control condition. In some cases, there is also a person who is similar to the participant in the related domain (e.g., both the person and the participant do not win the lottery). In the first part, participants encounter a person who is better than the participant in a specific domain (e.g., the person wins the lottery and the participant does not that is, the experimental condition). Such tasks include two sequential parts (e.g., Feather and Sherman, 2002 Feather and Nairn, 2005 Van Dijk et al., 2006 Takahashi et al., 2009 Feather et al., 2013 Van de Ven et al., 2015 Baez et al., 2016, 2018 Santamaría-García et al., 2017 Lin and Liang, 2021). Previous studies have often utilized a scenario task to investigate whether envy influences envious persons’ feelings of schadenfreude when misfortunes occur to enviable persons. Nevertheless, it is of interest to understand whether envy increases schadenfreude in different situations. Therefore, when other individuals experience misfortune, it is often thought that the envious person will not sympathize with them and instead will feel malicious joy (i.e., schadenfreude Smith, 2000). Envy is thought to be one of the most potent causes of unhappiness, and an envious person wishes to inflict misfortune on others ( Russell, 1930). The findings provide novel evidence that malicious envy does not always increase schadenfreude particularly when schadenfreude is elicited through social comparisons.Įnvy is a social-comparison-based emotion that is elicited when “a person lacks another’s superior quality, achievement, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it” ( Parrott and Smith, 1993). More importantly, malicious envy turned out to reduce feelings of schadenfreude in both gain and loss frames, when participants did not know the exact amount (i.e., ambiguous social comparisons). The results showed that when participants knew the exact amount of monetary gained and lost by themselves and the other player (i.e., precise social comparisons), malicious envy increased feelings of schadenfreude only in the loss frame rather than in the gain frame. Subsequently, the participants observed that the player encountered a misfortune, that is, gained less or lost more money than the participant. In the experimental condition, participants gained less or lost more than the other player in the control condition, both the participants and the player gained little or lost much. To address this issue, participants in the present study were asked to play a monetary game with several other players. Thus, the present study aimed to investigate whether malicious envy influences schadenfreude when schadenfreude is elicited in the context of precise and ambiguous social comparisons. However, as a social-comparison-based emotion, schadenfreude was not investigated through social comparisons in these previous studies. Previous studies have investigated whether envy, particularly malicious envy, increases feelings of schadenfreude and whether this effect is evident in both gain and loss frames. 3School of Education, Guangdong University of Education, Guangzhou, China. ![]() 2Laboratory for Behavioral and Regional Finance, Guangdong University of Finance, Guangzhou, China.1Institute of Applied Psychology, School of Public Administration, Guangdong University of Finance, Guangzhou, China.
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