London - If you feel a pang of guilty pleasure when you read celebrity tittle-tattle, don’t be too hard on yourself.
Hearing juicy gossip about famous people apparently fires up the brain’s pleasure centre in the same way as eating the finest food or even winning the lottery.
And it’s not good news that gives us the biggest buzz. Tales about stars’ troubles are what we crave, with affairs, drink-driving and other misdemeanours stirring up feel-good chemicals in the brain.
Most of us would never admit that we enjoy such tales but brain scans carried out during a study show that deep down, we find them highly amusing.
Researchers scanned the brains of a group of students while a person read out snippets of gossip about them, their best friends and a host of movie stars. Some of the gossip was designed to put the person in a bad light, such as having an affair or walking out on their family. They may have been the victim of bad luck, such as being in a hit and run accident. Other gossip included heartwarming tales of caring for the sick and helping parents track down missing children.
The volunteers were also asked how amusing they found each piece of information.
The most interesting results related to the negative stories about the celebrities. These stirred up dopamine and other feel-good chemicals in the brain’s ‘reward region’.
The scans, carried out at Shenzhen University in China, revealed that the students were particularly tickled by tales of stars’ misfortune, with a celebrity scandal exciting the brain more than news of a friend in trouble. However, they would not admit to finding the celebrity gossip amusing – perhaps because they didn’t want be seen to be gloating over the misfortunes of others.
Adam Perkins, neurobiologist from King’s College, London, was fascinated by the findings which were published in the journal Social Neuroscience. ‘Celebrities are particularly likely to be envied, and when they fall from grace we therefore are likely to feel particularly happy,’ he said.
‘An interesting follow-up study would be to investigate whether personality characteristics affect responses to negative gossip about celebrities.
‘For example, and this is speculative, people who are prone to feeling miserable might gain pleasure from hearing about celebrities having a bad time because it makes them feel that famous people can also feel bad.’
He suggested our love of celebrity scandal has ancient roots, adding: ‘Since we are essentially running round the modern world with a cave person’s brain, it may perhaps be that our familiarity with the lives of celebrities tricks our brains into seeing them as within our peer group and therefore direct competition for us, even though we have never met them.
‘When a celebrity falls from grace, our brain’s reward centres activate as if we had witnessed the downfall of a more successful rival within our own tribe.’
Daily Mail