Do you rub your hands in glee if an acquaintance fails to land their dream job? Or chuckle¹ when someone spills their coffee down their white shirt? If so, then it could be because you’ve got low self-esteem, according to researchers.

如果你认识的一个人没能获得梦想的工作，你是否洋洋自得呢？或者在某人把咖啡溅到白衬衫上时，你是否暗自发笑？研究人员说，如果是这样，那是因为你感到自卑。

Enjoying someone else’s misfortune is known as schadenfreude（幸灾乐祸） and scientists from Leiden University in the Netherlands say that the lower your self-esteem, the more you’ll experience it.

'If somebody enjoys the misfortune of others, then there's something in that misfortune that is good for the person,’ said study researcher Wilco W van Dijk.

Van Dijk and his colleagues drew their conclusions after testing 70 undergraduates by asking them to read two interviews, reports LiveScience.

The first was about an ambitious student who was aiming to secure a dream job. The second was a chat with his supervisor² who revealed that his academic success had been extremely patchy（不调和的） and that he wouldn't be offered the role.

The volunteers were then given various statements and asked to what degree they agreed with them.

Their responses would measure their susceptibility to schadenfreude.

The statements included ‘I enjoy[ed] what happened to Marleen/Mark’ and ‘I couldn’t resist a little smile.’

Self-esteem levels had been worked out in a separate test before this stage of the experiment and the results show that those with a low opinion of themselves were happiest at learning of the student’s misfortune.

To add even more veracity³ to the study those with low self-esteem were tested again after they’d been given some short and intense positive thinking exercises – and their schadnfreude levels dropped.

Van Dijk told LiveScience: ‘I think when you have low self-esteem, you will do almost anything to feel better, and when you're confronted with the misfortune of others you'll feel schadenfreude.

‘In this study, if we give people something to affirm their self, then what we found is they have less schadenfreude - they don't need the misfortune of others to feel better anymore.’