Empathy Or Schadenfreude?-The Brain Mechanism When Misfortune Occurs To Our Loved One And Disliked One

Imagination and future thinking are people expecting future through mental simulation of situation event, which is significant for human adaptation. It allows people to adjust plan, regulate mood, as well as to promote the relation between knowledge and action. An important characteristic of imagination and future thinking is emotional arousal. There are various expression ways when negative events happen to others. People might feel depressed in light of empathy, whereas some people might gloat due to retaliatory pleasure. For this study, emotion is considered as a critical influence factor. We want to explore the difference and brain mechanism when people simulate misfortune occurs to their loved one and disliked one.This study is divided into two parts, the first one is material collection, including negative event and emotional figure. The second one is experimental scanning. In this part, participants are asked to imagine unfortunate events happening to their favorite positive character, or happening to those negative people they dislike. After each imagination, they will score its emotion valence and difficulty level using Likert 5 point method. fMRI scanning would go through the whole process.Paired T test of behavioral data find that people have a higher emotion score of imagining positive character experiencing negative events compared with negative character. There is no significant difference of these two difficulty scores.For brain imaging, these two imagination tasks both activated typical brain region of default network (imagination of positive people with unfortunate events:precuneus, angular gyrus, hippocampus; imagination of negative people with unfortunate events: medial prefrontal cortex, angular gyrus, precuneus, hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus). What’s more, the typical region of the dorsal attention network is deactivated. (imagination of positive people with unfortunate events:middle frontal gyrus, Superior Parietal; imagination of negative people with unfortunate events:Frontal Inferio、 Superior Parietal、middle frontal gyrus).Correlation analysis of behavioral data and brain activation find that, for simulation of unfortunate events happening to positive people, left and right insula are intensely activated from deactivated with increasingly active emotional evaluation.The research shows that: When the disliked one confronted with misfortune, we could not feel the same empathy as the loved one happening that.The process that imagining the loved one suffered misfortune needs control function. Insula is an important area related to schadenfreude when simulating the misfortune happening to our disliked people.