Procedure
Individuals interested in the study received a Qualtrics link to an online demographic questionnaire via email. Participants who met inclusion criteria were then asked to identify a disliked person and a neutral person. Then, participants were invited to a first session in the laboratory for pre-training measures one week before the beginning of the trainings. For each laboratory session, a maximum of 8 participants were invited. Participants assessed their emotions (schadenfreude and compassion) after reading misfortune scenarios involving the disliked person and identical scenarios involving the neutral person. Then, participants evaluated their feelings of closeness toward the disliked person as well as the neutral person. At the end of the laboratory session, each participant was individually informed by the experimenter (orally) about the training they were randomly assigned to. Participants were then enrolled to their respective training (compassion, reappraisal, or Italian training) for 5 weeks. For post-training measures, participants were invited again to the laboratory and were required to not mention the training they had been following to the other participants as the sessions were grouped. They completed the same measures that were used for the pre-training, namely the emotions felt during the misfortune scenarios, and the feelings of closeness. At the end of the experiment, participants were asked to rate their motivation and interest for the training.