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23 January 2006
Vengeance A Male Game 
A brain imaging study conducted at University College London found that men appear to get greater satisfaction than women when witnessing retribution or acts of revenge. This male schadenfreude (pleasure at seeing revenge exacted) was highlighted during an experiment undertaken to compare empathy in the brains of people watching someone they either liked, or disliked, suffering pain. The study, reported in Nature, involved tests where a volunteer was placed in a magnetic resonance imaging brain scanner while he or she watched "guilty" or "innocent" actors receiving a mild electric shock. When "innocent" actors received this stimulation, both female and male volunteers showed empathy activation in pain related areas of the brain. When a "guilty" actor received a shock, the women taking part in the experiment showed empathy with them as well. But brain images of the male volunteers showed no increased activity in the empathy-related areas, but tellingly, did reveal a surge in the "reward" region of the brain. This reward-related activity was not seen in the majority of female participants, who appeared to have empathy for both the "guilty" and "innocent" actors suffering pain. "These results suggest that fairness in social situations shapes the nature of the emotional link we have to other people. We empathize with others if they cooperate and act fairly. But, in contrast, selfish and unfair behavior compromises this empathic link. So, when the unfair player received a painful shock there was, at most, very little sign of anything registering in the empathy-related region of the men as opposed to the reward-related area where there was activity. They expressed more desire for revenge and seemed to feel satisfaction when unfair people were given what they perceived as deserved physical punishment," said Dr Tania Singer, who led the study. "This type of behavior has probably been crucial in the evolution of society as the majority of people in a group are motivated to punish those who cheat on the rest. This altruistic behavior means that people tend to protect each other against being exploited by society's free-loaders, and evolution has probably seeded this sense of justice and moral duty into our brains. This investigation would seem to indicate there is a predominant role for men in maintaining justice and issuing punishment," Singer concluded. Source: University College London
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