title: Your misery is no longer my pleasure: Reduced schadenfreude in Huntington's disease families.
abstract: Schadenfreude - pleasure at others' misfortunes - has been systematically related to ventral striatum activity. This brain region is affected early in individuals with manifest and pre-manifest Huntington's disease (HD). However, the experience of schadenfreude has not yet been investigated in HD. In this study, 21 manifest HD patients, 19 first-degree asymptomatic relatives, and 23 healthy controls performed an experimental task designed to trigger schadenfreude, envy (another social emotion acting as an affective control condition), and control situations. Both HD patients and first-degree relatives experienced lower schadenfreude in response to others' misfortunes, with no group differences in ratings of envy and control conditions. These results offer unprecedented evidence of a highly specific impairment in reward processing, extending previous reports in manifest and pre-manifest HD individuals. Moreover, these findings suggest that early striatal impairments may be related to reduced feelings of schadenfreude. In sum, our work contributes to the understanding of emotional impairments in early stages of HD, while shedding light on their neural correlates.
authors: Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive and Translational Neuroscience (INCyT), INECO Foundation, Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Grupo de Investigación Cerebro y Cognición Social, Bogotá, Colombia.
authors: Sandra
authors: S
authors: Baez
authors: Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive and Translational Neuroscience (INCyT), INECO Foundation, Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Grupo de Investigación Cerebro y Cognición Social, Bogotá, Colombia; Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia.
authors: Hernando
authors: H
authors: Santamaría-García
authors: Universidad Autónoma del Caribe, Barranquilla, Colombia.
authors: Janni
authors: J
authors: Orozco
authors: Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive and Translational Neuroscience (INCyT), INECO Foundation, Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
authors: Sol
authors: S
authors: Fittipaldi
authors: Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive and Translational Neuroscience (INCyT), INECO Foundation, Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Faculty of Elementary and Special Education (FEEyE), National University of Cuyo (UNCuyo), Mendoza, Argentina.
authors: Adolfo M
authors: AM
authors: García
authors: Universidad Autónoma del Caribe, Barranquilla, Colombia.
authors: Mariana
authors: M
authors: Pino
authors: Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (LPEN), Institute of Cognitive and Translational Neuroscience (INCyT), INECO Foundation, Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Universidad Autónoma del Caribe, Barranquilla, Colombia; Center for Social and Cognitive Neuroscience (CSCN), School of Psychology, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago de Chile, Chile; Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Sydney, Australia. Electronic address: aibanez@ineco.org.ar.
authors: Agustín
authors: A
authors: Ibáñez
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D004645:Empathy; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D006816:Huntington Disease / Q000523:psychology*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D057181:Pleasure; D012919:Social Behavior; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Envy; First-degree asymptomatic relatives; Huntington's disease; Schadenfreude; Social emotions