Aggressive behavior brings emotional pain to the sadist

We have assumed forever that sadists are aggressive and enjoy the pain of others.And it’s true that people with sadistic personality traits do tend to be belligerent, and only enjoy their aggressive acts if they harm their victims.

However, according to a series of studies of over 2000 people, these actions ultimately leave sadists feeling worse than they felt before their harmful acts. The research appears in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

What the researchers say: “Sadistic tendencies don’t just exist in serial killers, but in everyday people and are strongly-linked to greater aggressive behavior,” said the lead author of the paper.

In the real world, sadists might be someone bullying others to feel better about themselves (which is true of most office bullies, or parental or spousal abusers) or even a group of sports fans looking for rival fans to fight for the“excitement” of it.

In their lab the scientists behind this study gauged people’s aggressive and sadistic tendencies by measuring participant’s likelihood to seek vengeance or to harm an innocent person following a series of virtual events. Mostly these events were trivial, but the sadist’s reactions were not proportional to the offense. They not only sought to disproportionately harm the person or persons who they felt had harmed them but innocent people as well.

With each scenario, the researchers found those with a history of aggression and sadistic behaviors, as measured by personality tests and questionnaires,showed more pleasure in causing harm to others, as expected, but surprisingly the researchers also saw that the sadists’ overall mood went down following the event. In other words, sadists are aggressive because they get a rush of dopamine—the reward neurochemical—when they contemplate or inflict pain on others. However, the pleasure is short-lived and is followed by a depressive episode. It may be due to how aggression affects the brain, making people perceive something as pleasurable, when it actually creates the opposite effect, suggests the lead researcher.

The researchers think that psychologists treating sadists can break the link between pleasure and inflicting pain by changing how the sadist perceives the harm they inflict, or by helping them understand how their actions will harm themselves, the therapists may be able to “short-circuit” the aggression cycle.

The complex relations between the positive feelings before or during aggression in sadists, coupled with the negative mood following a sadistic behavior,suggests there are several ways to understand, and hopefully address, violence.

“Aggression is often thought of as a product of negative feelings such as anger, frustration, and pain—yet this is not the whole story,” said the lead author. The new studies on the link between aggression and sadism suggest that positive feelings are also an important cause of human violence. “Going forward, psychologists should not neglect this side of the aggressive coin,” he concludes.

So,what? Potentially this is a very important study since it alters much of what we have always thought about human aggression. Personally, I have always thought that anger—particularly unjustified anger—and aggression were signs of depression in males. This has certainly been born out by recent studies. It’s also true that most (but by no means all) sadists are male though up until now neither I nor anyone else (except for one 2011 study) directly linked sadism and depression.

It’s possible that sadism (male or female) itself is a form of addiction.Overall the researchers’ findings seem to show that sadism works rather like most addictions. The addict is unable to get pleasure normally (i.e. to get a dopamine or oxytocin rush from those things that naturally give humans pleasure—supportive relationships, praise, certain foods (the relationship between sweet foods and pleasure has been exploited by the candy and soft drink industries), giving and a whole range of other things or activities—and so double down on the one thing that seems gives them the charge. This could be alcohol, gambling—or sadistic behavior. The link between depression and other forms of addiction is fairly well established.

This study shows that the charge resulting from sadistic behavior is—like alcohol, gambling etc.—short-lived. In fact, the pleasure decreases in longevity the more the addiction is indulged.

So, the office bully is really a depressive and his, or her, bullying will only increase over time.