It happened again

[Awe Thor]

---

Madelaine McMasters wrote:

Your

absense

of evidence isn't evidence of

absense

---

Awe . . . for someone who argues so much, why do you keep making these very basic mistakes?

ETA: All the references quoted related to North American studies; they aren't generalisable, and have been selectively identified by a biased collator - would you ask Obama which party to vote for and expect a balanced view?

ETFA: The article you quote is irrelevant, anyway; it wasn't the concept of positive thinking that you were asking about, but books about positive thinking.

ETEFA: As you note, no causative link has been identified; perhaps 90% of the people who believed in positive thinking could not participate in the studies because they were dead, having jumped off a roof believing they could fly. That would also help to explain why I have never met anyone who could.

ETAOMT: I've no reason to think they will find evidence of causation - which doesn't include a double negative to dilute significantly the statement's impact.

[Dillon Levenque]

---

Awe Thor wrote:

---

Dillon Levenque wrote:

While it is true that shadenfreude means enjoying other people's troubles

---

No it doesn't. If you are going to discuss a concept you might at least spell it correctly.

---

Yes, it does. You point out that I spelled 'it' incorrectly, thus you meant the word I meant to write: schadenfreude. Merriam-Webster defines it as:

:

enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/schadenfreude

 

---

Awe Thor wrote:

---

---

Dillon Levenque wrote:

Your golf example leads me to believe you don't know a lot about professional golf. Six shots to get out of a bunker?

 

---

..it happens. Even to the best.

---

Does it? I doubt it. It certainly did not in the example you show here. Tiger took two shots escaping the bunker, not six.

 

[Awe Thor]

---

Dillon Levenque wrote:

 

---

Awe Thor wrote:

---

Dillon Levenque wrote:

While it is true that shadenfreude means enjoying other people's troubles

---

No it doesn't. If you are going to discuss a concept you might at least spell it correctly.

---

Yes, it does. You point out that I spelled 'it' incorrectly, thus you meant the word I meant to write: schadenfreude. Merriam-Webster defines it as:

:

enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/schadenfreude

 

---

Awe Thor wrote:

---

---

Dillon Levenque wrote:

 

Your golf example leads me to believe you don't know a lot about professional golf. Six shots to get out of a bunker?

 

---

..it happens. Even to the best.

 

 

---

Does it? I doubt it. It certainly did not in the example you show here. Tiger took two shots escaping the bunker, not six.

 

---

Hmm, so you can count better than you can spell.

Awe . . . at least up to two, anyway.

ETA I could have sworn he said "Four" before he played his first bunker shot.

[Madelaine McMasters]

---

Awe Thor wrote:

---

Madelaine McMasters wrote:

Your

absense

of evidence isn't evidence of

absense

---

Awe . . . for someone who argues so much, why do you keep making these very basic mistakes?

ETA: All the references quoted related to North American studies; they aren't generalisable, and have been selectively identified by a biased collator - would you ask Obama which party to vote for and expect a balanced view?

ETFA: The article you quote is irrelevant, anyway; it wasn't the concept of positive thinking that you were asking about, but

books

about positive thinking.

ETEFA: As you note, no causative link has been identified; perhaps 90% of the people who believed in positive thinking could not participate in the studies because they were dead, having jumped off a roof believing they could fly. That would also help to explain why I have never met anyone who could.

ETAOMT:

I've no reason to think they will find evidence of causation - which doesn't include a double negative to dilute significantly the statement's impact.

---

The argument you make about the locale of the study and the bias of the collator will apply to all locales and all locators. Science handles that daily.

Yep, I did word my question as if it were all about the books. I'll offer up the same question about the concept. Is it entirely bunk?

Feel free to promote your theory that positive thinking research is severely impacted by jumpers. It would be pretty exciting to discover that researchers had unwittingly managed to identify a subset of the general population decimated by a 90% jumper fatality rate. Or were you suggesting that 90% of the general population has jumped to their death?

My belief that we'll make progress on the causation (or rather my disbelief that we won't ;-) stems from my belief that science will continue to progress in any direction it probes. There are plenty of people probing in this direction.

The "dilution" in my statement was intentional. I'm not certain about any of this stuff.

[Awe Thor]

---

Madelaine McMasters wrote:

 

I'm not certain about any of this stuff.

---

Then you must have views on the likelihood of scientific progress (wasting your tax dollars) on other non-existent phenomena, like poultergeists, UFOs, cold fusion, perpetual motion machines, invisible pink unicorns etc?

Awe . . . there must be a limitless number of subjects for you to post about in these forums that you don't have a clue about.

[Madelaine McMasters]

---

Awe Thor wrote:

there must be a limitless number of subjects for you to post about in these forums that you don't have a clue about.

---

Precisely!

[Carole Franizzi]

Maddy wrote: “If that shadenfreude is apparent, might the social dynamics punish the holder?”

I doubt it. You talk about it as if it is a hypothetical phenomenon, rather than one which actually exists, and, I’m guessing, has always existed. Much of the world’s gutter press is based on the minor and major downfalls of stars, starlettes, politicians and sportspeople. Prince William is losing his hair. Antonio Banderas is looking old. His wife was mistaken for a trout at an angling competition and got a fish hook through her swollen lip. President XYZ has a secret love child… And what about our day-to-day conversations? What percentage of them are hand-rubbing gossip? Let’s be honest… Societies don’t punish all that. They will actually encourage it. If a powerful/rich/leading nation takes a tumble, you’ll see schadenfreude on an institutionalised scale in other countries, including ‘friendly’ ones.

 

 Maddy wrote: “But I don't think I'd be surprised to discover that even when only known internally, that schadenfreude has an effect on health. What if it's discovered that people who engage in it frequently live longer than those who don't? I don't expect we'll see that study soon, and it'll be surrounded by critique, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that our natures affect our health.”

Schadenfreude isn’t a bad habit like ciggy smoking. It’s a natural, instinctive, process which plays a part in preserving our psychological well-being. The more it’s present, the more the ‘holder’ evidently needs such a mechanism to deal with their own self-esteem issues. The healthier the self-esteem, I reckon, the fewer the episodes, internally and externally, manifested. But no-one will ever be totally schadenfreude-free. Maybe Mother Theresa. Or maybe not. It’s something we cannot know. However, as I said before, my belief is that it’s an effect, not a cause.

 

Maddy ETA-ed: “While those "power of positive thinking" books might be mostly bunk, do we know they're all bunk?”

They’re not bunk. They have exactly the same result as schadenfreude.  Instead of using specific others  and their mishaps to make positive comparisons about ourselves – I’m not losing my hair, I still look young for my age, I don’t get mistaken for a trout – we let an author talk us into believing how great we are through sweeping generalisations. I don’t know about you, but I have a number of friends who litter Facebook with self-comforting little sayings on a regular basis:

 

• I believe that reality is a sublime comedy staged for my education & amusement and that there is a benevolent conspiracy to liberate me from my ignorance and help transform me into the unique masterpiece I was born to be.

(Yeah, right)

 

• Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.

(Popular as a screen-saver among high-school drop-outs still living on unemployment cheques at the age of 35)

 

• Be thankful for your limitations, because they give you opportunities for improvement.

(So, if you were born into poverty, in a war zone, and spent your childhood in a refugee camp trying to avoid dying of hunger, getting raped or murdered, catching typhoid or malaria, you should be really, really grateful?)

 

• The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude

(Tell that to the kid in the refugee camp.)

 .

•        There are no menial jobs, only menial attitudes

(This from a very wealthy multiple degree holder, one of which a Ph.D, one of which from Harvard Law School, who held menial posts under Regan and Bush, one of which Secretary of Education…)

 

• People too weak to follow their own ambitions will always find a way to discourage yours

(No, really, I think it’s a great idea to hand in your notice, sell the house, take the kids out of school, buy a boat and sail round the world till the money runs out. You should be ok for a couple of years, right? Hey, by that time your daughters will be over 18 and your wife will only be 39 – all three of them will surely get jobs in that nice little club for adult male entertainment down in downtown Shanghai.)

 

• The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.

(Said by Einstein. And he could get away with it. He actually was a genius. Slapped over FB pages by people who spell it “genious”…slightly more indigestible.)

 

• I wouldn’t have to manage my anger if people would learn to manage their stupidity.

(No doubt t-shirts with this one are high sellers amongst wife-beaters)

[Carole Franizzi]

Awe….While I am delighted to see the common sense you are bringing to this thread, Carole, I am afraid I have to disagree with you ….

Me: Good. You know how I like a bit of a debate. Well, no you don’t know that. How could you? You don’t know me. Erm. Sorry. Got confused there.

 

 Awe….schadenfreude would not exist without empathy;

Me: You’re saying that schadenfreudish (what the hell is the adjective of that word??) reactions pass first through empathy? First you share in the pain, then you transform your acquired pain into enjoyment? So you’re saying that basically schadenfreude is mental self-pleasuring for masochists? 

 

Awe…you HAVE to comprehend the feelings of another person before you can take pleasure in their discomfiture.

AND  . . Even Simon Baron-Cohen, who should  know better, confuses empathy with sympathy.

Me: Well, that depends on what you mean by ‘comprehend’. Recognise and label? The cat is sad. The bird is happy. The dog is angry. Frown, smile, grimace. I see you frown. I know you are what’s termed as ‘sad’. But am I bovvered? Not necessarily.

Now, I’m thinking about a grizzly bear rearing up in front of you, claws out, ready to tear your head off. Does he know you’re poo-scared? Yep.

Is he sympathetic? Nope.

Does he share your emotional state? Nope again.

Is he an example of schadenfreude? Doubt it. Just wanting his lunch, more like it.

Yeah, yeah, I know bears are animals and we need human examples – well, apparently serial killers all exhibit total emotional detachment from their victims, to the point that the victim is an object, not a fellow being capable of arousing empathy or sympathy. In fact, the victim’s fear is what gives these creatures their fun. Are they sharing the fear? Nah. They can recognise it, but there ain’t a drop of empathy or sympathy in sight. Re: sympathy Vs empathy - criminal psychologists seem mostly to refer to lack of empathy, not lack of sympathy, when they discuss pathological personalities, however I may be wrong. Anyway, if Borat makes the same error as me, I’m in good company.

My feeling is that, if a person truly feels empathy for another’s suffering, they will never ever be capable of finding pleasure in it, for they would be getting kicks from what is now, in part, their own pain. If they are feeling pleasure over a person’s suffering, then no way in hell did they feel anything close to empathy beforehand. They might think they did, of course, but if a person is emotionally damaged, they’re not in a great position to know what normal emotional processes actually feel like. Having said that, I reckon we’re all capable of shutting off empathetic and sympathetic responses when our own well-being takes priority. You just wouldn’t want that to be happening to you all the time.

 

 

 

[Solar Legion]

---

Ren Toxx wrote:

---

Malanya wrote: @

Ren, why should someone be followed in world aand whine about a forum post? If someone did that to me I would mute that person right after I saw their IM was a complaint. PM if you have an issue and heck yes there is a difference between the forums and in world I am sure most people don't want to be harassed by a sore butt forum poster they don't know.

---

Malanya, it seems to me that what would really bother you (as would many others, including me, of course) is the 

'whining'

thing...

not

that it's done through a forum PM or an in-world IM.

Ask yourself this: if someone IM'd you in-world complimenting one of your forum posts, saying that it's well thought, reasoned, informative, nice or whatever... would you take umbrage at it just because the person chose to tell you so in-world?

To be honest, I really don't understand why such a big deal is being made over the choice of medium; I would think that the really sad part is that the issue between Gadget and Fenna

l has escalated beyond a mere civil disagreement and into a multi-user exchange of heavy accusations, thinly (if at all) veiled insults and whatnot.

---

And people wonder why I have what I do in my sig line .... Want to rant and rave and throw insults at me? Do it here (and risk your account) or send a PM.

[Awe Thor]

---

Carole Franizzi wrote:

Does he share your emotional state? Nope again.

 

---

Empathy isn't about SHARING an emotional state. Empathy isn't about CARING about another's emotional state - except to the extent that you extract a feeling of schadenfreude from it. Empathy is about being able to identify it - as you have suggested with your "recognise and label" comment.

Awe . . . admits a similarity to serial killers - who ARE empathic - because he knows what others are thinking and enjoys it.

ETA "Emotional detatchment" is an entirely different concept from "unempathic".

ETFA Borat's actually his cousin

[Awe Thor]

---

Carole Franizzi wrote:

 

My feeling is that, if a person truly feels empathy for another’s suffering, they will never ever be capable of finding pleasure in it, for they would be getting kicks from what is now, in part, their own pain. If they are feeling pleasure over a person’s suffering, then no way in hell did they feel anything close to empathy beforehand. They might think they did, of course, but if a person is emotionally damaged, they’re not in a great position to know what normal emotional processes actually feel like.   

---

I disagree with all this. I think you are confusing the unproven concept of  "mirroring" with "empathy".

Awe . . . what does "emotionally damaged" mean, anyway?

[Dillon Levenque]

---

Carole Franizzi wrote:

 

 

.

•        
  There are no menial jobs, only menial attitudes

---

I have to agree that a lot of those Facebook sayings you quoted are litter, although the one about menial jobs did resonate.

I've never understood people who thought of their jobs as menial or unimportant. I've never felt that way about any of my jobs. If my job was to sweep the parking lot, I was the best damned parking-lot-sweeper ever. Missed no corners. Knew about the afternoon winds and made sure I always worked from upwind.

That's a somewhat extreme example (true, though) but I have always felt that anyone doing a job was entitled to respect for for no other reason than they are doing their job. If someone takes the job seriously and tries to do it as well as it can be done (as I always have), that effort should be rewarded. That's why I always look right at people who bring me food in restaurants or help with my luggage or put gas in my car or whatever, and say 'Thank you." I want them to know I appreciate that they're doing their job (yes, I know, there's another way to do that and of course I do that, too).

Okay, this was a major derail, but this thread is so far off the original tracks already the guy driving the locomotive is just praying for something like solid ground so he can keep the speed up without spinning the wheels.  You touched a nerve.

[Madelaine McMasters]

---

Carole Franizzi wrote:

Maddy wrote: 

“If that shadenfreude is apparent, might the social dynamics punish the holder?”

I doubt it. You talk about it as if it is a hypothetical phenomenon, rather than one which actually exists, and, I’m guessing, has always existed. Much of the world’s gutter press is based on the minor and major downfalls of stars, starlettes, politicians and sportspeople. Prince William is losing his hair. Antonio Banderas is looking old. His wife was mistaken for a trout at an angling competition and got a fish hook through her swollen lip. President XYZ has a secret love child… And what about our day-to-day conversations? What percentage of them are hand-rubbing gossip? Let’s be honest… Societies don’t punish all that. They will actually encourage it. If a powerful/rich/leading nation takes a tumble, you’ll see schadenfreude on an institutionalised scale in other countries, including ‘friendly’ ones.

I didn't say, nor mean to imply that shadenfreude was hypothetical and I do expect it's been around a long time. I'm theorizing that if a person is perceived to be a "shadenfreudist", that might affect the dynamics of their social circle. 

Sharing a love of gutter press with the masses does not elevate your schadenfreude to the level of "apparent". You're just down here in the background noise with the rest of us.

But even at the macro level, are you sure that if it could be done, a direct survey or perhaps meta-analysis of proclivity towards schadenfreude along with general well being would show no correlation? We do such soft studies all the time, and we often argue about the results, but they can be thought provoking.

And now let's mix the macro and the micro. Google wouldn't need proof of causality to target schadenfreudists if they had correlation with other behaviors they could exploit for gain. 

You've already described some examples of schadenfreudic public content. If you can identify it, so can Google. Although we may not be highly aware of our schadenfreude (or any number of human behaviors), detecting it in an individual seems well within the wheelhouse of "big data".

Maddy wrote: 

“But I don't think I'd be surprised to discover that even when only known internally, that schadenfreude has an effect on health. What if it's discovered that people who engage in it frequently live longer than those who don't? I don't expect we'll see that study soon, and it'll be surrounded by critique, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that our natures affect our health.”

Schadenfreude isn’t a bad habit like ciggy smoking. It’s a natural, instinctive, process which plays a part in 

preserving

 our psychological well-being. 

The more it’s present, the more the ‘holder’ evidently 

needs

 such a mechanism to deal with their own self-esteem issues. The healthier the self-esteem, I reckon, the fewer the episodes, internally and externally, manifested. But no-one will ever be totally schadenfreude-free. Maybe Mother Theresa. Or maybe not. It’s something we cannot know. However, as I said before, my belief is that it’s an effect, not a cause.

Modern society evolved a hell of a lot faster than our genes. How can we be sure that schadenfreude has the same benefit now as it did 50,000 years ago? In ancient times, hearing a twig snap in the woods and thinking it was a predator was worth being wrong 99 out of 100 times because the one time you were right, the tiger didn't eat you. That same causal search mechanism is now credited with belief in fairies, ghosts, and shamans who preach the refusal of proven effective medicines and procedures. Nobody would advocate for the elimination of this subconscious mechanism, but many call for us to understand that it's error prone and strive to reduce its negative impact on us individually and collectively. If a mechanism is natural and instinctive, does that automatically make it healthy?

Have you contradicted yourself by saying that schadenfreude is a process which plays a part in preserving our psychological well-being, but is not a cause? If it causes nothing to happen, then it plays no part. The strength of this mechanism may be correlated to self-esteem, and it may have been the effect of evolution, but it if it's playing a part in preserving psychological well-being, then it is a cause.

The National Institutes of Health are funding research into the health effects of meditation. We already know that certain kinds of meditation affect dopamine production and blood flow in specific brain regious. We know we can teach patients to think in ways that reduce their need for pain medications. Functional MRI is helping locate specific regions of the brain which are responsible for specific kinds of cognition and thinking, and to better understand neurotransmitter production and modulation. You just know someone will eventually do schadenfreude tests on people with their heads stuck in MRI machines.

Maddy ETA-ed: 

“While those "power of positive thinking" books might be mostly bunk, do we know they're all bunk?”

They’re not bunk. They have exactly the same result as schadenfreude.

They do? Exactly? How do you know? Wouldn't all the books be interchangeable then? I think there's more complexity here than you're acknowledging. All those neurochemists and pyschologists will want something to do, Carole!

Instead of using specific others  and their mishaps to make positive comparisons about ourselves – I’m not losing my hair, I still look young for my age, I don’t get mistaken for a trout – we let an author talk us into believing how great we are through sweeping generalisations. I don’t know about you, but I have a number of friends who litter Facebook with self-comforting little sayings on a regular basis:

I'm not on Facebook.

Could implying that, unlike your friends, you don't litter Facebook with self comforting statements, be a self comforting statement? Don't we all comfort ourselves, Carole? I know I just did by stating that I'm not on Facebook.

;-)

 

---

[Randall Ahren]

Look who I saw at SLB10:

 

 

[Suspiria Finucane]

---

Carole Franizzi wrote:

 (bff does stand for beyatchy female foes, doesn't it?)

 

---

Love it! ...and it just might :matte-motes-evil:

 

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Carole Franizzi wrote:

Glad to see you too. Though probably not as glad as someone else I can think of who, without your never-give-in attitude would have had oodles of hours less entertainment in these forums. But then, let's be honest - you're kinda pleased to see him back too. 'Fess up. On ya go. I'll tickle you till you admit it!

Frankly, I think the pair of you should get SLhitched. I could make a fortune selling tickets for your couples therapy sessions.

---

It is interesting how one character revolves around another, revolves around another, revolves around another etc. And yes, I'll admit bantering with the original was entertaining. What intrigues me however; is the actual hatred some people show on this forum. You would think 2 years away from someone would soften the hate but it hasn't.

 

 

---

Carole Franizzi wrote:

 Edited to add this PS - don't get the hippy-thingy reference. Remind/illuminate me.

---

 

[Suspiria Finucane]

---

Malanya wrote:

---

Suspiria Finucane wrote:

---

Malanya wrote:

 

p.s. I am not arguing.

 

---

 More semantics. Perhaps you have never heard of opening arguments in every court case.

 

---

Malanya wrote:

Having an opinion is not an argument

---

 

An unexpressed opinion isn't worth much.

 

---

Malanya wrote:

edit- in regards to you quoting my phrase to Czari, I make friends with people while in the forum and then take it in world. It's my personal preference. We all have our own choices here in sl and just because someones belief does not go along with anothers clearly doesn't make either wrong = personal choice.

---

Quite frankly I think we agree on that point.

 

 

So what you could have said is: Disputes that happen in the forums ..

should

stay in the forums

---

Not in a court, it's a forum, and if it's looked at that way my "opening argument" was many posts back.. an opinion of what my opinion is worth is fine. I rather like the way I said the phrase "what happens in the forums, stays in the forums"  I do believe that it's personal choice, it's just not mine. In this case IMO, the poster did follow the OP in world and it was a form of aggressive action, I say this because of all the posts that showed the anger and hypocritical side of the person that replied to the OP.

---

[Suspiria Finucane]

---

Randall Ahren wrote:

Look who I saw at SLB10:

 

 

---

Qie Niangao: example #2

[Tex Monday]

makes me want to go watch a Benny Hill Episode....:matte-motes-sunglasses-3:

[Czari Zenovka]

---

Randall Ahren wrote:

Look who I saw at SLB10:

 

 

---

So that's what he looks like.  Scary-looking dude. :matte-motes-agape:

[Carole Franizzi]

Maddy wrote:I didn't say, nor mean to imply that shadenfreude was hypothetical and I do expect it's been around a long time. I'm theorizing that if a person is perceived to be a "shadenfreudist", that might affect the dynamics of their social circle.

Me: Sorry, but I took your ‘if’ and ‘might’ as the hypothetical voice. Anyway, yes, I think it’s safe to bet that a ‘hardcore schadenfreudist’ who openly reacts with glee over his/her friends’ misadventures wouldn’t have too many Christmas card on their mantelpiece. It could also be argued that in today’s society a moderate dose of real or apparent schadenfreud would actually get you lots of friends.

 

Sharing a love of gutter press with the masses does not elevate your schadenfreude to the level of "apparent". You're just down here in the background noise with the rest of us.

Not at all sure what you mean by this statement. It sounds like I claimed the superiority of gutter press readers over background noise people. I’m pretty sure I didn’t.

 

But even at the macro level, are you sure that if it could be done, a direct survey or perhaps meta-analysis of proclivity towards schadenfreude along with general well being would show no correlation?

No, I’m convinced it would show a correlation. Actually, I think you’ll find it’s been done many times over, though measuring “general well-being” isn’t usually the aim of psychological research. It’s a bit too vague. Replace “general well being” with any one of its components and I think you’ll find a lot of literature out there.

 

We do such soft studies all the time, and we often argue about the results, but they can be thought provoking.

And now let's mix the macro and the micro.

I prefer mine shaken, please. And with an olive. Actually, make that two olives.

 

Google wouldn't need proof of causality to target schadenfreudists if they had correlation with other behaviors they could exploit for gain. 

I could be persuaded that the profit-driven business Google isn’t overly curious about exactly which states of anxiety lie behind their clients’ need to seek out the juicy details of a Hollywood divorce. Supplying Google with data to make their profits even higher would be on awfully good reason not to spend one’s academic life on such research, should this be one’s field. 

 

You've already described some examples of schadenfreudic public content. If you can identify it, so can Google. Although we may not be highly aware of our schadenfreude (or any number of human behaviors), detecting it in an individual seems well within the wheelhouse of "big data".

Yep.

 

Modern society evolved a hell of a lot faster than our genes. How can we be sure that schadenfreude has the same benefit now as it did 50,000 years ago?

I don’t think we can ever be 100% sure of anything ‘psychological’ which happened 50,000 years ago in order to make that comparison you’re asking about. However, the mere persistence of any self-defence mechanism is, I’m guessing, proof enough that human psyches are still in need of them. You know, there’s a lot of stuff in this world that can’t be abolished just because some people feel they’re ‘unhealthy’ or not useful. I for one would be delighted to see misogyny abolished. Most people would vote for ‘banning’ depression, anxiety, racism…but it just doesn’t work that way.

 

In ancient times, hearing a twig snap in the woods and thinking it was a predator was worth being wrong 99 out of 100 times because the one time you were right, the tiger didn't eat you.

In modern times, not accepting a lift from a strange man just in case he’s a sex-predator is worth being wrong 99 times out of 100, because the one time in 100 that you turn out to be right, the consequences of being trapped in a car parked down a dark country lane with a knife at your throat are well worth all those long walks home, under the rain, along brightly lit, crowded, safe streets. You really think we’ve evolved out of our need for self-defence mechanisms?

 

That same causal search mechanism is now credited with belief in fairies, ghosts, and shamans who preach the refusal of proven effective medicines and procedures.

What same causal search mechanism? Weren’t we talking about protective mechanisms? What are causal search mechanisms anyway? And ghosts? Fairies? You really lost me here.

 

 Nobody would advocate for the elimination of this subconscious mechanism…

Just as well. They’d be wasting their time. On the other hand, I firmly believe my campaign to make emotional detachment illegal will be very successful.

 

…but many call for us to understand that it's error prone and strive to reduce its negative impact on us individually and collectively.

Who are these ‘many’ calling for the acknowledgement that psychological self-defence mechanisms have outgrown their purpose?

 

If a mechanism is natural and instinctive, does that automatically make it healthy?

Curling up into a ball to protect the vulnerable abdominal area when attacked is another natural defence mechanism. It’s neither healthy nor unhealthy. It’s necessary.

 

Have you contradicted yourself by saying that schadenfreude is a process which plays a part in preserving our psychological well-being, but is not a cause? If it causes nothing to happen, then it plays no part.

No, I don’t think I have. Schadenfreude derives from a certain state of mind – I think I called it a barometer or something like that, because it reveals information about that state of mind. However, it occurs primarily to serve a self-defending purpose – the bolstering of the self-esteem, the attenuation of anxiety, etc. It also has its place in a chain of causal events, of course – as we said, ‘hardcore schadenfreude’ would negatively impact social relationships. In this secondary phase, it most definitely assumes the role of cause, though not the root one of the chain of cause-effect events.

 

The strength of this mechanism may be correlated to self-esteem, and it may have been the effect of evolution, but it if it's playing a part in preserving psychological well-being, then it is a cause.

Is emotional detachment in an adult, resulting from having a cold, unloving parent, a cause or an effect? Surely it’s the effect of the original trauma, and the subsequent cause of difficulty to form loving adult relationships? It’s first an effect, then a cause, however, it’s not the cause of the original trauma (see above).

 

The National Institutes of Health are funding research into the health effects of meditation. We already know that certain kinds of meditation affect dopamine production and blood flow in specific brain regious. We know we can teach patients to think in ways that reduce their need for pain medications. Functional MRI is helping locate specific regions of the brain which are responsible for specific kinds of cognition and thinking, and to better understand neurotransmitter production and modulation. You just know someone will eventually do schadenfreude tests on people with their heads stuck in MRI machines.

They've already done them. (see link below)

 

Maddy ETA-ed: “While those "power of positive thinking" books might be mostly bunk, do we know they're all bunk?”

Carole: They’re not bunk. They have exactly the same result as schadenfreude.

Maddy: They do? Exactly? How do you know? Wouldn't all the books be interchangeable then? I think there's more complexity here than you're acknowledging. All those neurochemists and pyschologists will want something to do, Carole!

They work when the person is ripe for being talked round. Be it a book they actively go out and purchase, a pal, a loving mother, a guru, themselves beyatchily enjoying the misfortunes of someone they dislike or resent, or even a string of clichéd, over-simplified, over-generalised, de-contextualised ‘philosophical’ gems collected from web sites and pasted on their Facebook page, when a person is of a frame of mind to jolly themselves along /let themselves be jollied along and be convinced that they’re doing good it’s because that’s exactly what they need in that moment of their lives, and then anything can potentially act as a supplier of mantras. And that’s good and healthy and one of the methods we humans use to survive the hardships of life. And, contrarily, if you’re not ‘ripe’, nothing in the world will alter self-perception. Proof? Let’s use extreme, negative examples of the power of persuasion and self-persuasion: consider cults which convince dozens of people to commit suicide simultaneously, and how about anorexia? - distorted body perception which cannot be altered even by loving family members and specialised health professionals, even when the sufferer is literally starving to death. Convincing someone that men being from Mars is the reason why their marriage didn’t work out is a much less ambitious task in comparison. They sell because they ‘work’, Maddy. Exactly how they work is complicated, though…

All those psychologists are already familiar with the notion of the immense power of persuasion and self-persuasion without me introducing the concept to them, Maddy. And, yes, of course it’s much more complicated than this, but this is a forum for a VR after all.

 

Could implying that, unlike your friends, you don't litter Facebook with self comforting statements, be a self comforting statement? Don't we all comfort ourselves, Carole? I know I just did by stating that I'm not on Facebook.

;-)

I have no problem with stating openly that I do not subscribe to the Meme School of Self Help. It could be argued that this is more an act of patronising boasting though, than self-comforting. However, I have absolutely nothing against self-comforting. We couldn’t survive without it. None of us. Me included. It’s just that my form of self-comforting is of a much more sophisticated nature. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s nearly bed-time and I need to go and look for my pacifier.

Here’s some bedtime reading for you: http://www.goallab.nl/publications/documents/2011_Emotion_Van%20Dijk%20et%20al.pdf

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/01/26/0956797610397667.abstract

[Carole Franizzi]

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Suspiria Finucane wrote:

---

Carole Franizzi wrote:

 (bff does stand for beyatchy female foes, doesn't it?)

 

---

Love it! ...and it just might :matte-motes-evil:

 

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Carole Franizzi wrote:

Glad to see you too. Though probably not as glad as someone else I can think of who, without your never-give-in attitude would have had oodles of hours less entertainment in these forums. But then, let's be honest - you're kinda pleased to see him back too. 'Fess up. On ya go. I'll tickle you till you admit it!

Frankly, I think the pair of you should get SLhitched. I could make a fortune selling tickets for your couples therapy sessions.

---

It is interesting how one character revolves around another, revolves around another, revolves around another etc. And yes, I'll admit bantering with the original was entertaining. What intrigues me however; is the actual hatred some people show on this forum. You would think 2 years away from someone would soften the hate but it hasn't.

 

 

---

I'm willing to bet he was entertained too. Verbal ping-pong and all that. I would never have written any of my WoT's if others hadn't responded. And I get more dismayed by agreement  - which effectively ends the debate - than disagreement which extends it. Without an 'adversary', many aspects of 'forumism' are pointless.

Re: hatred. Hell, I don't hate anyone in RL, go figger in SL!  I've never been too convinced about SLurve - the act of loving a faceless stranger known through their avatar and choice, crafted snippets of 'information' which can't be verified - and I'm equally unconvinced about hating a faceless stranger. What is there to hate? When you don't even know a person, how can you hate them? 

Re: your jump-suit. Ah! Gotcha. Yep, that has 'Carole' written all over it....

 

[Carole Franizzi]

I have to be honest - I find that one particularly galling because the person who coined it was (is?) a very privileged, wealthy man who most probably never did any job in his entire life which could be considered menial. It’s doubly irritating to me because of the word ‘attitude’. In my mind I see him looking condescendingly at his secretary, while saying this phrase, just after he’s asked her to sew a button on his jacket. The implication being it’s her fault if she feels demeaned, because it’s a problem of her attitude, not his demands. Plus, it’s politically correct rot. Of course, there are menial jobs. I’ve done more than a couple of them in my life-time. And, like you, I did them as best I could and with a smile on my face. It’s the attitudes of those I was serving which at times was soul-destroying. My particular pet hate was that horrible impatient finger-snapping to get you to hurry up. Urgh. No, Mister Whateverhisnameis, it was not my attitude which was the problem. There's nothing worse than being told how you should feel by someone who has absolutely no idea how you feel, and may actually be the cause of you feeling less than respected.

[Carole Franizzi]

 Awe…come on!

 The Wiki article you linked is about mirror neurons, (!!!???!) and, ironically, if you scroll down far enough, it says that neuroscientists think that maybe this mirror neuron thingy is the neurological starting point for the human capacity to understand intentions, be self-aware and…wait for it…feel empathy!

 This isn’t a case of confusing one concept with a similar one – we’re back to cause and effect - (possible but unproven) physiological cause and cerebral/emotional effects. 

[Madelaine McMasters]

---

Carole Franizzi wrote:

Maddy wrote:

I didn't say, nor mean to imply that shadenfreude was hypothetical and I do expect it's been around a long time. I'm theorizing that if a person is perceived to be a "shadenfreudist", that might affect the dynamics of their social circle.

Me: Sorry, but I took your ‘if’ and ‘might’ as the hypothetical voice. Anyway, yes, I think it’s safe to bet that a ‘hardcore schadenfreudist’ who openly reacts with glee over his/her friends’ misadventures wouldn’t have too many Christmas card on their mantelpiece. It could also be argued that in today’s society a moderate dose of real or apparent schadenfreud would actually get you lots of friends.

I'm agreed. And this argues for the "appearance" of shadenfreude having an effect on well being. I don't know what that effect is, nor how it's related to the degree of visibility, but it seems reasonable to think it does have an effect.

Sharing a love of gutter press with the masses does not elevate your schadenfreude to the level of "apparent". You're just down here in the background noise with the rest of us.

Not at all sure what you mean by this statement. It sounds like I claimed the superiority of gutter press readers over background noise people. I’m pretty sure I didn’t.

I meant that "apparency" is just that, something which rises above the fray. The "you" wasn't a you you, it was an anyone you! ;-) Those of us who have an average level of schadenfreude won't elicit a reaction as we're not as easily detectable.

But even at the macro level, are you sure that if it could be done, a direct survey or perhaps meta-analysis of proclivity towards schadenfreude along with general well being would show no correlation?

No, I’m convinced it

would

show a correlation. Actually, I think you’ll find it’s been done many times over, though measuring “general well-being” isn’t usually the aim of psychological research. It’s a bit too vague. Replace “general well being” with any one of its components and I think you’ll find a lot of literature out there.

Yep, I'm also sure it would show a correlation. And that's the argument I've been trying (clumsily?) to make... schadenfreude has an effect on our well-being.

We do such soft studies all the time, and we often argue about the results, but they can be thought provoking.

And now let's mix the macro and the micro.

I prefer mine shaken, please. And with an olive. Actually, make that two olives.

I hope that neither macro nor micro are sweet.

Google wouldn't need proof of causality to target schadenfreudists if they had correlation with other behaviors they could exploit for gain. 

I could be persuaded that the profit-driven business Google isn’t overly curious about exactly which states of anxiety lie behind their clients’ need to seek out the juicy details of a Hollywood divorce. Supplying Google with data to make their profits even higher would be on awfully good reason

not

to spend one’s academic life on such research, should this be one’s field. 

Google is curious about everything. One of the fascinating aspects of "big data" is that our newfound ability to collect (or perhaps an inability to not collect) vast amounts of data across a wide swath of humanity makes it easy to look for all sorts of correlations. Google is famous for their "throw it against the wall and see if it sticks" method of innovating. They also have psychologists on staff. (Microsoft employes "game psychologists" to make MS Office more "addictive.) Academia may find itself outrun by business.

You've already described some examples of schadenfreudic public content. If you can identify it, so can Google. Although we may not be highly aware of our schadenfreude (or any number of human behaviors), detecting it in an individual seems well within the wheelhouse of "big data".

Yep.

 

Modern society evolved a hell of a lot faster than our genes. How can we be sure that schadenfreude has the same benefit now as it did 50,000 years ago?

I don’t think we can ever be 100% sure of anything ‘psychological’ which happened 50,000 years ago in order to make that comparison you’re asking about. However, the mere persistence of any self-defence mechanism is, I’m guessing, proof enough that human psyches are still in need of them. You know, there’s a lot of stuff in this world that can’t be abolished just because some people feel they’re ‘unhealthy’ or not useful. I for one would be delighted to see misogyny abolished. Most people would vote for ‘banning’ depression, anxiety, racism…but it just doesn’t work that way.

The persistence of evolved mechanisms over the short span of recorded history is due to the glacial pace of evolution, not to continued "need".

In ancient times, hearing a twig snap in the woods and thinking it was a predator was worth being wrong 99 out of 100 times because the one time you were right, the tiger didn't eat you.

In modern times, not accepting a lift from a strange man just in case he’s a sex-predator is worth being wrong 99 times out of 100, because the one time in 100 that you turn out to be right, the consequences of being trapped in a car parked down a dark country lane with a knife at your throat are well worth all those long walks home, under the rain, along brightly lit, crowded, safe streets. You really think we’ve evolved out of our need for self-defence mechanisms?

I think I've argued that we have NOT evolved out of our mechanisms, but that society may be evolving to make those mechanisms less optimal than they were (or maybe more optimal, who knows?)

That same causal search mechanism is now credited with belief in fairies, ghosts, and shamans who preach the refusal of proven effective medicines and procedures.

What same causal search mechanism? Weren’t we talking about protective mechanisms? What are causal search mechanisms anyway? And ghosts? Fairies? You really lost me here.

Our brains are wired to search for cause->effect. When we see an effect, absent a rational cause, we're generally happy to invent an irrational one.

Nobody would advocate for the elimination of this subconscious mechanism…

Just as well. They’d be wasting their time. On the other hand, I firmly believe my campaign to make emotional detachment illegal will be very successful.

 

…but many call for us to understand that it's error prone and strive to reduce its negative impact on us individually and collectively.

Who are these ‘many’ calling for the acknowledgement that psychological self-defence mechanisms have outgrown their purpose?

I didn't say anyone was arguing that they've outgrown their purpose, I said the opposite in "nobody would advocate for their elimination" (even if it were possible). Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Sagan and others have been arguing that we've got to be aware that our intinctive need to find causes for the effects we see isn't necessarily rational. I wonder if schadenfreude isn't sorta the same way. It's a mechanism devised by trial and error that worked well enough to survive. That's not proof that it's the best mechanism, nor that we can't consciously work out better ways, which we might internalize alongside those instinctive mechanisms. Before you come back to argue that we might just as easily work out worse ways, I'm pretty sure we have, and will!

If a mechanism is natural and instinctive, does that automatically make it healthy?

Curling up into a ball to protect the vulnerable abdominal area when attacked is another natural defence mechanism. It’s neither healthy nor unhealthy. It’s necessary.

It is not always necessary. Instinct sometimes gets it wrong, as in misfiring of that cause->effect pattern matcher that has you sell your house for a loss because you think it's become haunted. When we've got the time (and if we have the ability) to think about things rationally, we have the opportunity to improve on instinct. 

Have you contradicted yourself by saying that schadenfreude is a process which plays a part in preserving our psychological well-being, but is not a cause? If it causes nothing to happen, then it plays no part.

No, I don’t think I have. Schadenfreude

derives

from a certain state of mind – I think I called it a barometer or something like that, because it reveals information about that state of mind. However, it occurs primarily to serve a self-defending purpose – the bolstering of the self-esteem, the attenuation of anxiety, etc. It also has its place in a chain of causal events, of course – as we said, ‘hardcore schadenfreude’ would negatively impact social relationships. In this secondary phase, it most definitely assumes the role of cause, though not the root one of the chain of cause-effect events.

You're continuing your contradiction. If shadenfreude is only an effect, then it serves no purpose. It would be like saying that a runny nose is simply the effect of a cold, and serves no purpose. It actually does have a purpose, to ridd the sinus cavities of the infectious organisms. If schadenfreude can make us feel better about our selves, it is causing something.  The question is whether that mechanism is always helpful. A runny nose may have been the best solution to improving well-being before the invention of medicines and the arrival of societies that thought a runny nose was uncouth. Too much schadenfreude (or not enough?) might also have a deletrious effect, particularly in light of our increasing ability to detect it. Evolution knows nothing about these recent developments.

The strength of this mechanism may be correlated to self-esteem, and it may have been the effect of evolution, but it if it's playing a part in preserving psychological well-being, then it is a cause.

Is emotional detachment in an adult, resulting from having a cold, unloving parent, a cause or an effect? Surely it’s the effect of the original trauma, and the subsequent cause of difficulty to form loving adult relationships? It’s first an effect, then a cause, however, it’s not

the

cause of the original trauma (see above).

Yes, a cause can also be an effect. This is how you get feedback loops. And it's those feedback loops we sometimes need to break.

The National Institutes of Health are funding research into the health effects of meditation. We already know that certain kinds of meditation affect dopamine production and blood flow in specific brain regious. We know we can teach patients to think in ways that reduce their need for pain medications. Functional MRI is helping locate specific regions of the brain which are responsible for specific kinds of cognition and thinking, and to better understand neurotransmitter production and modulation. You just know someone will eventually do schadenfreude tests on people with their heads stuck in MRI machines.

They've already done them. (see link below)

Yep, I hear about new studies all the time.

 

Maddy ETA-ed: 

“While those "power of positive thinking" books might be mostly bunk, do we know they're all bunk?”

Carole: They’re not bunk. They have exactly the same result as schadenfreude.

Maddy: They do? Exactly? How do you know? Wouldn't all the books be interchangeable then? I think there's more complexity here than you're acknowledging. All those neurochemists and pyschologists will want something to do, Carole!

They work when the person is ripe for being talked round. Be it a book they actively go out and purchase, a pal, a loving mother, a guru, themselves beyatchily enjoying the misfortunes of someone they dislike or resent, or even a string of clichéd, over-simplified, over-generalised, de-contextualised ‘philosophical’ gems collected from web sites and pasted on their Facebook page, when a person is of a frame of mind to jolly themselves along /let themselves be jollied along and be convinced that they’re doing good it’s because that’s exactly what they need in that moment of their lives, and then anything can potentially act as a supplier of mantras. And that’s good and healthy and one of the methods we humans use to survive the hardships of life. And, contrarily, if you’re not ‘ripe’, nothing in the world will alter self-perception. Proof? Let’s use extreme, negative examples of the power of persuasion and self-persuasion: consider cults which convince dozens of people to commit suicide simultaneously, and how about anorexia? - distorted body perception which cannot be altered even by loving family members and specialised health professionals, even when the sufferer is literally starving to death. Convincing someone that men being from Mars is the reason why their marriage didn’t work out is a much less ambitious task in comparison. They sell because they ‘work’, Maddy. Exactly how they work is complicated, though…

All those psychologists are already familiar with the notion of the immense power of persuasion and self-persuasion without me introducing the concept to them, Maddy. And, yes, of course it’s much more complicated than this, but this is a forum for a VR after all.

I think we're agreeing here, Carole. The "hows" of helping ourselves get through life are terribly complex. Schadenfreude is but one "how". The only argument I've been trying to make is that schadenfreude likely does have an effect on our health. Whether it has a positive or negative effect would depend on the degree and the circumstance, as such things do. The complexity might be such that it's ultimately a pointless argument, but I wonder if Big-Data and the law of inintended consequences might provide some insight into it in the future. Big-Data fascinates me. It's the largest sort of meta analysis we've yet undertaken, and most of us don't even know we're doing it (or being done in by it? ;-), including  companies that might mine data for correlations without really understanding what they're looking at.

Could implying that, unlike your friends, you don't litter Facebook with self comforting statements, be a self comforting statement? Don't we all comfort ourselves, Carole? I know I just did by stating that I'm not on Facebook.

;-)

I have no problem with stating openly that I do not subscribe to the Meme School of Self Help. It could be argued that this is more an act of patronising boasting though, than self-comforting. However, I have absolutely nothing against self-comforting. We couldn’t survive without it. None of us. Me included. It’s just that my form of self-comforting is of a much more sophisticated nature. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s nearly bed-time and I need to go and look for my pacifier.

Couldn't patronizing boasting be a form of self comfort, just like schadenfreude?! People say I'm intimidating. I don't think that's my intent, but if I appear that way, it could well be that I've honed mechanisms to protect my ego that appear itimidating to others. It's not schadenfreude, but could it have an effect on me that I don't understand? And when I say "I don't think that's my intent", I am acknowledging that I am the sum of both my conscious and subconscious selves, that I don't have a good understanding of how I really work and that I'm curious.

Here’s some bedtime reading for you:

http://www.goallab.nl/publications/documents/2011_Emotion_Van%20Dijk%20et%20al.pdf

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/01/26/0956797610397667.abstract

Thanks for the links. I've not read those particular articles, but I've read many over the years that delve into the same things. Psychology (like the related field of economics) is a fairly soft science and I suppose a fairly young one too, given that it's only recently that we've got our hands on even the most primitive tools for studying the physical thing (the brain) that's responsible for all the odd things we do.

---

ETA: my choice of the common cold was a poor one. Though we have medicines, none actually cure the cold. But hopefully you get the drift of that particular argument. Society and technology move on time scales far different from evolution.

[Paul Hexem]

It's a big event. Lots of people were there. I just didn't take pictures of them. Do you have a crush on me? Lots of people do. We can be friends if you want.