Your misery is no longer my pleasure: Reduced schadenfreude in Huntington?s disease families

SANDRA BÁEZ; SOL FITTIPALDI; HERNANDO SANTAMARÍA; AGUSTÍN IBÁÑEZ; ADOLFO GARCÍA; JANNI OROZCO; MARIANA PINO

CORTEX

ELSEVIER MASSON

Lugar: Paris; Año: 2016 vol. 83 p. 78 - 85

0010-9452

Schadenfreude -pleasure at others´ misfortunes- has beensystematically related to ventral striatum activity. This brain region isaffected early in individuals with manifest and pre-manifest Huntington´sdisease (HD). However, the experience of schadenfreude has not yet beeninvestigated in HD. In this study, 21 manifest HD patients, 19 firstdegreeasymptomatic relatives, and 23 healthy controls performed anexperimental task designed to trigger schadenfreude, envy (another socialemotion acting as an affective control condition), and controlsituations. Both HD patients and first-degree relatives experienced lowerschadenfreude in response to others´ misfortunes, with no groupdifferences in ratings of envy and control conditions. These resultsoffer unprecedented evidence of a highly specific impairment in rewardprocessing, extending previous reports in manifest and pre-manifest HDindividuals. Moreover, these findings suggest that early striatalimpairments may be related to reduced feelings of schadenfreude. In sum,our work contributes to the understanding of emotional impairments inearly stages of HD, while shedding light on their neural correlates.