The relationship between heart rate and the experimentally induced feelings of schadenfreude and envy

People sometimes envy another individual with desirable traits, and even experience positive emotions when observing the person suffering misfortune. Schadenfreude is the social emotion experienced when others are in an unfortunate situation without one's hand in it. The psychological and neurological mechanisms of schadenfreude have been investigated, but its relationship with the autonomic nervous system response has not. The current study (N=21 undergraduate students), thus, investigated the relationship between envy, schadenfreude, and heart rate. While self-reported measurements indicated that participants indeed experienced envy and schadenfreude, they were not correlated with heart rate.