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From the article: A recent study examined Americans’ feelings of schadenfreude and sympathy toward Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis in 2020. The findings, published in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, revealed that Democrats expressed more schadenfreude and less sympathy toward Trump’s diagnosis compared to Republicans. Democrats were also more likely to think that the diagnosis would sway people’s votes in the upcoming election.

Schadenfreude, a German word that has been adopted by the English language, describes a feeling of pleasure at another person’s misfortune. This emotion tends to occur within competitive environments, often when there is a conflict between two groups. Study author Joanna Peplak and her co-authors wanted to explore the role of schadenfreude within a particularly heated intergroup context — the latest U.S. presidential election.

“I have been interested in schadenfreude (i.e., feeling pleasure in others’ misfortunes) for some time now and have been primarily conducting research on individual and development differences in children’s and adolescents’ experiences of schadenfreude in social interactions,” explained Peplak, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California-Irvine.

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When Hilary got sick and fell that had an outsized effect on her campaign too.

In the game 1960 Making of a President i recall it mentioning Nixon's injury had swayed some votes.

But Nixon had said he would visit all 50 states if I recall that correctly too, which he wasn't able to do.

I guess the first big televised debate is what did him in, sadly not because of what he said but just because of how he looked.

Please don't feed the psypost trolls. They are not deserving of your clicks. Your confirmation bias is just feeding a soulless corporate machine.

I don't think schadenfreude was the feeling. I wouldn't describe it as pleasure.

At the time Trump had been downplaying the virus and spreading harmful rhetoric that was going against medical advice.

Trump then being diagnosed and hospitalized was a demonstration that this virus was serious and it may be worth listening to qualified people about.

So I personally thought it was a good thing he got it because it weakened his harmful rhetoric which hopefully led people to make better choices while we were waiting for vaccinations.

If you don’t think people felt pleasure at Trump getting Covid then you and I have very different social media feeds

My understanding of schadenfreude has always been a more general idea of pleasure in misfortune of unknown others. Like seeing a passerby trip and fall, I equate it with a brief respite from self-pity. Trump causing so much harm from anti-vax messaging and then getting sick is more like direct “just desserts”. When a bully goes around punching people and finally gets punched back, is that schadenfreude or just that specific guy getting what he deserves?

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I'm not sure I felt schadenfreude about his diagnosis. I was mostly hoping that if he died then his supporters might have taken it more seriously. Instead, he survived and somehow used it as him passing some form of mythical 'trial by fire'.

I remember being a little shocked at people downplaying to outright denying she was unwell for political purposes.

Like guys this is a woman in her sixties campaigning very strenuously, it just looked silly to have people accusing others of being conspiracy theorists to suggest it was taking a physical toll.

Warranted pleasure

See, this why I don’t get the above comment. What fantasyland do they live in?

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He was hospitalized for 3 days.

I doubt that he actually caught covid. He tested positive one day, panicked, and rushed to the hospital for a new experimental treatment. Then tested negative. This beggars the imagination.

Nobody is hospitalized for a cold unless their immune system is completely shot. Trump was in a hospital for 3 days.

And emerged totally high on emergency steroids.

A soulless corporate machine or not, if the article is good, it deserves to be talked about here.

The problem is that the psypost articles aren't good.

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Or maybe he just handled Covid well? That’s also a possibility.

That’s great, how is your thoughts on the matter a reflection on what millions of people think tho? I also personally wasn’t celebrating but I can read and go the internet. People were definitely happy he got Covid and hoped for the worst.

I didn’t wish anything bad on him publicly or privately, but I don’t have the hubris to think I can speak to the feelings of hundreds of millions of people, especially when I can see what they’re writing about the subject

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He looked that way because he refused to put on makeup.

But that’s revisionist history. “Taking a physical toll” is different from “one foot away from dying” which is what some people were making it out to be. I can’t help but notice we are 6 years out from that and she’s still alive, so perhaps people can admit now how over played that was.

This is some serious revisionist history. People were claiming everything from MS, to a stroke, to the fact that she was on her deathbed.

There was absolutely a cornucopia of conspiracy theories.

I didn't say everyone thinks that way; nor do I think that is what the original comment was trying to say. I am aware most people think differently.

Seems more like a personal reflection of their unique emotional response. Which is - not really best placed in a discussion of the scientific aspect, obviously. I just expanded on that.

I was just wondering that myself. "Just desserts" is an apt analogy, and I think there is a slight difference between that and schadenfreude.

I agree! It was almost like he had a pandemic playbook handed to him that would’ve averted much of the illness, including his own!

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>He is part of society

I dunno about that...

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I suspect it was simply a false positive test. If you get covid, your body begins to produce antibodies. Especially if you're handling covid well. It takes at least a week for those antibodies to drop off after you've fought off the virus. You'll continue to test positive during that time. Last December, my accountant called to tell us that he'd tested positive for covid. We got tested and found we were positive too. We had no symptoms because we were both vaxed and boosted. Still, we self quarantined for a little over a week until we were testing negative for a couple of days. This experience made think back on the Trump episode.

It was absolutely pleasurable, and had it finished the job orgasmic.

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You kinda just proved my point, no? He tested positive, he had the virus.

It's spelled "deserts" when used in that sense. I figured I'd mention it because everything else is well written and this is an odd one.

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Yes the only problem with how that all went was he survived. Would have been difficult to paint him as a martyr. Self inflicted buffoonery.

a needed correction, people will start and continue using it this way if nobody ever points this out

and that would annoy the likes of me

She passed out and dropped like a pound of rocks and was thrown in a van. It didn't really look great.

Hindsight is 20/20. 6 Years later and shes still strutting her stuff and talking to french clowns, having fun and being proven right every day. But she did not appear to be healthy and the media and her campaign didn't do a great job addressing what was happening. That's not a revisionist take.

I appreciate the correction. Thank you.

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Well, she had something, like the flu(?) at the time. It was weird nobody could just say she had the flu.

When I have an actual influenza A, I'm useless for at least 4-5 days. I don't hold that against anybody.

> My understanding of schadenfreude has always been a more general idea of pleasure in misfortune of unknown others.

This is what it actually means. Schaden means "damage" loosely translated, with "freude" obviously "pleasure". Taking pleasure of other's damage/misery.

I wanted him to survive it, but be as sick as I was, my patients were, and some of my family was. I wanted it to change him, change his mind.

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"just desserts" isn't bad, that extra 900 atk could be a game changer.

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Didn't he have a fever that night as well?

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Fortunately he lost the election. Unfortunately he didn’t get what he deserved.

Good thing you got vaccinated then!

First it was SUMMER WILL BURN THE VIRUS and the next winter he said something like ITS GONNA FREEZE TO DEATH. What a muppet.

These vaccines don't prevent people from getting sick though. That's why Democrats literally changed the definition of 'vaccine' in the formal sense. These vaccines only lessen the symptoms, supposedly, and may come with severe side effects or even death down the line. It's kind of a pick-your-poison scenario, imo.

Yeah, kinda like how good it felt when those people demanding we strip away peoples rights and demonize anyone who didn't believe the obvious lies, when they still needed up getting and spreading covid to people who were fully vaxxed and boosted. Oh how the smugness fell.

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So you mean a mild cold to zero symptoms, like every single person I personally knew who got it?

The definition of vaccine has not been changed. There is a formal definition which has been pretty consistent since the discovery that inoculating people with cowpox could boost the immune response against smallpox (cow <-> vaca -> vaccine)

It's worth noting that the flu vaccine does not stop all variants of influenza either. The notion that a vaccine will magically stop any and all variants of a virus is naive.

Also, since you did no homework, here's the definition of vaccine:

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=vaccine+definition

Me too. There's a few dead in there as well, but we'll not worry about what they might have said.

Yeah those old age homes that actively packed in sick people and aerosolized their breath to pump throughout the rest of the buildings, they were hit pretty hard. But let's pretend that this happened because some people didn't get a vaccine that didn't stop you from spreading the virus...

You’re calling it a fact that she was on her deathbed…

Schadenfreude is the feeling of joy you get from someone else's pain, as you and someone else said. Trump getting COVID wasn't schadenfreude, but many people (myself included) experienced schadenfreude from the knowledge that Trump was getting his just deserts.

Glad everyone you know made it. I know a couple people who didn’t and even more people who know someone further along the anecdote trail who didn’t.

No I'm not, but English is tough so I understand your confusion.

Yep and I know people who know people who have died of the flu. Death is awful, but so is allowing authoritarianism to thrive and truth to be labeled as dangerous violent misinformation that must not be allowed to be uttered in public.

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I just saw him contracting it as more evidence of his ineptitude for the job. He couldn't even protect himself, choosing not to wear a mask was one of the dumbest things I saw him do.

The CDC did change their definition of 'vaccine' and 'vaccination'.

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"Social media is calling bluff on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for modifying its definition of the words “vaccine” and “vaccination” on its website. Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.” The term “vaccine” also got a makeover. The CDC’s definition changed from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to the current “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”

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https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article254111268.html

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https://www.journalinquirer.com/opinion/chris_powell/vaccine-definition-was-changed-as-covid-19-virus-shots-weakened/article_e36de93e-7226-11ec-a67f-e3b8d07df769.html

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This is interesting information.

I did a little deeper digging to see what I could find about vaccines and breakthrough infections. It turns out there are a number of diseases which have breakthrough infections including, but not limited to, COVID-19, influenza, mumps, and chickenpox.

Most recently, a smallpox vaccine has been used to stimulate the immune system to fight monkeypox, which has seen breakthroughs in France.

I wonder whether COVID-19 was the genesis of the change, or simply the final straw.

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And threatened nuclear war while on roid rage.

Doctors don’t pump patients full of those drugs unless it is a very serious infection. Also, Presidents don’t get flown to Walter Reed for experimental treatments for mild “flu-like” illnesses. The dude almost got a Herman Cain award that day.

We tested positive every day for a little over a week before testing negative. If we had tested negative the day after testing positive, it would have been considered a false positive. It doesn't matter what medications are administered, the antibodies will hang around in your system for a number of days. If there are no antibodies, there was no infection.

It wasn’t the next day. He tested positive, went to Walter Reed on October 2nd, returned to the WH on October 5th. On the 7th, his doctor said he’d been symptom free for 24 hours. On the 12th, his doctor said he’d tested negative 2 consecutive days in a row. https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/10/12/trump-negative-covid-not-infectious-429068