Tracing down schadenfreude in spontaneous interaction. Evidence from corpus linguistics

© Cambridge University Press 2014. The concept of schadenfreude has a long and impressive history of negative characterizations. Schopenhauer bluntly categorized it as “the worst emotion of which humans are capable” (quoted in Smith et al., 2009, p. 543) and about a century later, in his book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (1958), the famous person perception psychologist Fritz Heider estimated schadenfreude to be harmful to social relations (quoted in Van Dijk, Goslinga, and Ouwerkerk, 2008, p. 631; see also Leach et al., 2003). Even in modern science, where the 1990s witnessed a renewed and empirically founded interest in the role of schadenfreude among psychologists, sociologists, and scholars in (business) communication, the concept of schadenfreude still suffers its negative reputation. Nowadays, the concept of schadenfreude is commonly described as a negative emotion, which is “socially undesirable” (Smith et al., 2009, p. 530) as this “malicious joy” (Van Dijk, Ouwerkerk, and Goslinga, 2009) derives pleasure from someone else’s misfortune or suffering (see also Feather and Nairn, 2005; Hickman and Ward, 2007, among others).status: publishe