Revenge-

welsh

Junkmaster
Apparently men love revenge more than women.

Come on, admit, you love to get a bit of payback don't you.

Favorite revenge? Lingering grudges? Come on, fess up.

Men get a bigger kick from revenge
Women don’t enjoy other’s misfortunes as much, brain study indicates

Updated: 1:22 p.m. ET Jan. 18, 2006
LONDON - Germans have a word for it — schadenfreude — and when it comes to getting pleasure from someone else’s misfortune, men seem to enjoy it more than women. Such is the conclusion reached by scientists at University College London, in what they say is the first neuroscientific evidence of schadenfreude.

Using brain-imaging techniques, they compared how men and women reacted when watching other people suffer pain.

If the sufferer was someone they liked, areas of the brain linked to empathy and pain were activated in both sexes. Women had a similar response if they disliked the person experiencing the pain, but men showed a surge in the reward areas of the brain.

“The women had a diminished empathic response,” said Dr. Klaas Enoo Stephan, a co-author of the report. “But it was still there, whereas in the men it was completely absent,” he added in an interview.

The scientists, who reported their findings in the journal Nature, said the research shows that empathic responses in men are shaped by the perceived fairness of others.

“Empathic responses to other people are not automatic, as has been assumed in the past, but depend on the emotional link to the person who is observed suffering,” Stephan said.

In the two-part study, 32 men and women volunteers played a game in which they exchanged money with four other people who were actors playing a part.

The actors were either fair characters, who returned equal amounts of cash that have been given to them, or unfair people who gave little or no money back to the volunteers.

In the second part of the experiment, the volunteers were placed in magnetic imaging brain scanners as they watched the actors receiving a mild electric shock, similar to a bee sting. The scientists measured reactions of the volunteers in areas of the brain associated with pain and empathy and reward while the actors experienced pain.


Functional brain imaging helps scientists understand the relationship between particular types of mental activity and particular areas of the brain, by charting which regions experience increased blood flow or metabolism or electromagnetic activity over time. It’s a step beyond CT scans, or CAT scans, which can map the brain’s structure but not its functions. Click on the labels above to learn more about three technologies used for functional brain imaging.

The responses shown in the brain images were backed up with questionnaires filled in by the volunteers. Men admitted to having a much higher desire for revenge than women and derived satisfaction from seeing the unfair person being punished.

“We will need to confirm these gender differences in larger studies because it is possible the experimental design favored men, as there was a physical rather than psychological or financial threat involved,” said Dr. Tania Singer, who led the study.
 
I can't IMAGINE why this might result *rolls eyes*. Perhaps that men are genetically predisposed towards greater competitition with one another? That people are generally still beholden to the reptilian part of the tripartite brain?
 
I wonder if women would be more likely to try to do psychological damage as part of revenge, while men would be less inclined to take any form of revenge? (i.e. according to some stereotypes)
 
as far as i'm concerned, payback for men usually involves a punch to the stomach or the head... with women you got years of gossiping & bad mouthing people.
 
SuAside said:
with women you got years of gossiping & bad mouthing people.
Or, if you put them in a puddle of mud and rip their t-shirts you get top quality entertainment.

I don't really have any grudges though. Cool article.
 
That study is ridiculous and proves nothing about either gender's tendency towards or love of revenge. It does prove two things: (1) that certain areas of men's and women's brains do or do not "light up" under certain not completely understood circumstances using certain brain-imaging techniques, and (2) that psychologists are always prepared to overvalue their research and oversimplify the causes and solutions of problems. Most likely the "research" was shoddily thought out and planned and the results poorly accounted for at best, like so much of the bullshit science we see today. I seriously doubt this is worth anything to anyone except to a pharmacutical company who can find a chemical that will make that area of the brain not "light up" during an experiment like this, and no doubt one is already working on a marketing campaign. Maybe they can call the resultant drug "Christamine - The Medication That Helps You Turn The Other Cheek".
 
Yay. Another study that has the bottomline of "We don't know nothing yet" but appears in a magazine if it would have just solved the Meaning of Life.

According to my personal experiences men tend to resort to physical aggression more easily (not neccessarily violence, just making noise and breaking stuff) but also tend to resolve their grudges more easily -- most intense conflicts I've experienced had vanished within less than a day.

Women on the other hand generally seem to be less direct but keep the gurdge up for insane amounts of time.

Conclusion? Men and women tend to have different typical characteristics. Go figure -- this just means there's a reason we eventually came up with different words to describe different people.

Generalising from a statistical tendency is as absurd as sticking to unfounded stereotypes. Statistics are the best evidence that the world is not black and white, yet they are always used to prove the opposite.

So, yeah, schadenfreude is a rather masculine trait and probably for evolutionary reasons so, too. What's the news in that? Nada.
 
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