Shad & Freud

New study from the British peer-review journal Nature, out today, seems to have caught several editorial eyes:

NYT

Study Shows Men Have Sweeter Feelings of Revenge Than Women

NEW YORK (AP) -- Bill Clinton said he felt others' pain. But a new brain-scanning study suggests that when guys see a cheater get a mild electric shock, they don't feel his pain much at all. In fact, they rather enjoy it.

In contrast, women's brains showed they do empathize with the cheater's pain and don't get a kick out it....

More detail at brainconnection.com

Revenge Replaces Empathy in Male Brain

The Germans have a word for it: schadenfreude, loosely translated as "taking joy in the misery of others."

It's what many folks feel when movie villains get blown away or a nasty co-worker gets fired.

Now a new brain-imaging study suggests that schadenfreude might be a distinctly male phenomenon.

Reward areas in the brains of male volunteers -- the same areas that delight in food, drugs or sex -- lit up when bad or unfair competitors appeared to be given jolts of pain. The same areas lay dormant when "innocent" individuals got zapped, however.

The schadenfreude effect did not surface in the brains of female volunteers, the British researchers found.

"You saw that there was a lot of pleasure that these males were seeking when they were able to watch this bad-behaving individual get pain," says John Hibbing, a University of Nebraska political science professor whose work focuses on the emotional and neurological forces driving human social and political behaviors....

[SNIP]

When the "fair" players got jolted, areas of the brain's frontal, executive centers associated with empathy lit up in both men and women, the researchers reported.

Then the cheaters got zapped.

Empathy centers in the brains of female participants lit up just as they had when they watched the "fair" players endure pain.

"However, these empathy-related responses were significantly reduced in males when observing an unfair person receiving pain," the researchers noted.

What's more, "this effect (in males) was accompanied by increased activation in reward-related areas, correlated with an expressed desire for revenge," they added.

These reward areas include more primitive brain regions such as the striatal system and the nucleus accumbens, they said.

This means that "for men, at least, the brain's reward system is activated when there's punishment of the bad guys," says neuroscientist Dr. Paul Sanberg, director of the Center for Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair at the University of South Florida College of Medicine in Tampa. "These are the same areas that are involved in reward for drugs and other things we want badly."

In fact, a similar brain-imaging study reported in Science last August found that revenge activates neurological centers linked to other strong urges, such as cocaine abuse or sexual attraction....