Schadenfreude Schadenfreude Schadenfreude (; ; 'harm-joy') is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another. It is one of four related emotions or concepts. Schadenfreude is a complex negative emotion. Rather than feeling sympathy towards someone's misfortune, schadenfreude evokes joyful feelings that take pleasure from watching someone fail. This emotion is displayed more in children than adults, however adults also experience schadenfreude, they are just better at concealing their expressions. "Schadenfreude" is borrowed from German; it is a compound of "Schaden", "damage, harm", and "Freude", "joy". The German
Pleasure pleasure itself as "freedom from pain in the body and freedom from turmoil in the soul". According to Cicero (or rather his character Torquatus) Epicurus also believed that pleasure was the chief good and pain the chief evil. In the 12th century Razi's "Treatise of the Self and the Spirit" ("Kitab al Nafs Wa’l Ruh") analyzed different types of pleasure, sensuous and intellectual, and explained their relations with one another. He concludes that human needs and desires are endless, and "their satisfaction is by definition impossible." The 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer understood pleasure as a negative sensation, one that