Schadenfreude as a Mediator between Dark Triad Personality and Sensational Interest

Abstract

There are different types of people with different feelings some are those who feel sad on someone’s failure whereas other people feel joyful about the same which is termed as ‘Schadenfreude’. Personality may play an important role in this or it may be just different interest and perspective, it may also be situation specific. When we talk about the dark side of human nature, the famous Dark Personality traits can be the way to understand these feelings of schadenfreude whereas sensational interest may also explain the reasons for the same. The aim of the study is to assess the relationship between Schadenfreude, Dark Triad and Sensational Interest in the sample of 130 participants with the age group of 18 to 25 (girls and boys). This is a quantitative analysis based research and the scales to measure these variables are Short Dark Triad (SD3), Sensational Interest Questionnaire Revised (SIQ-R) and Schadenfreude Scale. This research results revealed significant positive relationship between dark triad personality traits, sensational interest and schadenfreude which may explain the reason behind the feeling of schadenfreude. This study inferred that dark triad personality and sensational interest play an important role for the joyful feeling on misfortune of others as they are interconnected to each other because of their shared characteristics.