Two of the most socially uncomfortable emotions humans experience, envy and schadenfreude, are shaped by distinct cognitive processes in the brain, according to new research. The findings offer fresh insight into why people respond so differently to the good and bad fortune of others, with implications for how social behaviour is studied and understood.
The study, published in BMC Psychology, examined how executive functions and theory of mind contribute to the intensity of these two complex social emotions. Executive functions refer to a set of mental skills that include working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility. Theory of mind is the capacity to infer what other people are thinking or feeling.
Researchers recruited 103 adults aged between 30 and 50 in Chile and assessed them using three validated psychological tools. These were the Ineco Frontal Screening, which measures executive functioning; the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, which assesses theory of mind; and a Social Emotion Task that presented participants with written scenarios designed to provoke either envy or schadenfreude.
The results showed that executive functions were significantly associated with the intensity of both envy and schadenfreude. However, theory of mind told a more nuanced story. It was linked to envy but showed no meaningful relationship with schadenfreude, suggesting the two emotions draw on overlapping but partially distinct cognitive pathways.
To explore this further, the team conducted mediation analyses and found that theory of mind acted as a bridge between executive functioning and envy. In other words, stronger executive skills appeared to support better mental state inference, which in turn amplified the emotional experience of envy. No such mediation was found for schadenfreude.
The researchers suggest this distinction reflects the different social demands of each emotion. Envy involves social comparison, requiring a person to interpret someone else’s advantages relative to their own situation. That kind of nuanced social reasoning relies on the ability to model another person’s mental world. Schadenfreude, by contrast, appears more closely tied to evaluative and reward-based processes, such as judging whether someone deserved their misfortune, rather than requiring the same depth of perspective-taking.
This has broader relevance for the psychology of social emotions and moral cognition. Research into how people respond to others’ outcomes is increasingly important in understanding social media use, workplace dynamics, and the psychological roots of fairness judgements. The finding that schadenfreude may operate with less reliance on empathic or mentalising processes could help explain why it tends to feel more automatic and less reflective than envy.
The researchers note that the cross-sectional design of the study limits causal conclusions, and that replication across larger and more culturally diverse samples will be necessary. Future work incorporating additional emotional and motivational measures may help to further clarify what drives schadenfreude at the cognitive level.