Envy or schadenfreude? Reduced malicious pleasure in Huntington's disease familie

SANDRA BÁEZ; MARIANA PINO; INDIRA GARCÍA-CORDERO; HERNANDO SANTAMARÍA; AGUSTÍN IBÁÑEZ

Havana

Congreso; 18th IOP (The International Organization of Psychophysiology) World Congress; 2016

Schadenfreude ?pleasure at others? misfortunes? has beensystematically related to the ventral striatum activity. This brainregion has shown to be early affected in manifest and pre-manifestindividuals with Huntington?s disease (HD). However, no studieshave investigated the schadenfreude experience in HD. Twenty-onemanifest HD patients, 19 first-degree asymptomatic relatives, and 23healthy control participants performed an experimental task designedto trigger schadenfreude, envy (another social emotion acting as specific control condition) and control situations. Demographicand cognitive state data were compared among groups using ANOVAand Tukey?s HSD post-hoc tests. Chi square tests were applied toanalyze categorical variables (gender). Ratings of schadenfreude andenvy were analyzed via one-way ANOVAs. Tukey?s HSD post-hoctests were used when appropriate. To control for the influence ofgeneral cognitive status on the experimental task, we appliedANCOVA tests adjusted independently for MOCA and IFS total scores.Only those effects that remained significant after covariation arereported. Results showed no differences among groups in ratings ofenvy (F(2,61)= 1.57, p =0.2η2 =0.04) or ratings for neutralsituations (F(2,61) =1.49, p =0.23, η2= 0.04). However, therewere significant differences in schadenfreude ratings (F(2,61) =21.30, p b 0.001, η2 =0.41). A post-hoc analysis (Tukey?s HSD,MS=2.88, df= 61) revealed that HD patients (p b 0.001) andrelatives (p b 0.001) showed lower schadenfreude ratings thancontrols. No significant differences were observed between HDpatients and relatives (p =0.3). Present results shown a new andspecific dimension of the impaired reward processing previouslyreported in manifest and pre-manifest HD individuals. Moreover,these findings suggest that HD early striatal impairments seem to berelated to reduce feelings of schadenfreude. The present findingscontribute to the understanding of emotions processing impairmentsin early stages of HD. This work was partially supported by grantsfrom CONICET, CONICYT/FONDECYT Regular (1130920), FONCyTPICT2012-0412, FONCyT-PICT 2012-1309, FONDAP 15150012 andthe INECO Foundation.