Neurologists recorded an observer's brain's response while looking at someone playing a game. Responses depended upon the observers' implications in the game, whether they were neutral, wanted the player to win or wished for him to fail. The study is published in the open access journal BMC Neuroscience.

Professor Dr Thomas Münte collaborated on this research with a group of scientists from Otto von Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany, and the University of Barcelona, Spain and their experiment consisted in testing people observing a gambling game. A part of the subjects had to simply observe the game and some would win or lose money, whether the player won or lost, and researchers studied their electrical brain activity. When a particular stimulus occurs, like one player winning or losing in this case, the electrical activity of the brain suffers some changes, called event-related potentials.

In this experiment, scientists noted that if an observer made money when a player won, or if the subject simply observed, the gambler's losing triggered a type of potential associated with negative feedback in the observer's brain. In the opposite situation, where the subject makes money if the player loses, the negative potential appears once the gambler wins, relates AlphaGalileo.

Prof Dr Münte said that “In everyday life, situations are abundant in which the actions of one person have consequences for another individual. We set out to directly compare the effects of three types of situations, which we term parallel, reverse, and neutral, using event-related potentials in normal human participants.”

“The neutral experiment showed that the mere observation of another’s losses elicits a neurological response in the observer even without any direct engagement in the task or any relationship to the performer. In addition, our results in the three different conditions suggest that the observation of the performance of another person performing a task may activate two different evaluative processes in the brain, one is driven by the outcome of the other person and may be related to empathy whereas the other evaluates the consequences for oneself,” he added, speaking about the results.