New England Journal of Medicine

This image shows the bullet that was lodged in an 85-year-old man's head -- specifically, his foraman magnum -- for more than 80 years.

When a Russian man was only 3, his older brother accidentally shot him with a pistol. More than eight decades later, the bullet was still there, according to a case report just published online in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. 

The bullet hit the little boy right below the nose and eventually lodged itself in his foramen magnum, the opening in the bottom of the skull that allows the spinal cord to pass through and connect to the brain. The 3-year-old lost consciousness for several hours. At the time, a doctor examined the poor kid, but didn't remove the bullet for fear of causing more harm than good, says Dr. Marat Ezhov of Moscow's Cardiology Research Center, who examined the patient more than 80 years later. Incredibly, the boy recovered completely. 

"The body has an amazing ability to 'get used to' things," explains Dr. Richard O'Brien, a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians. "Also, children have a great ability to overcome hardship and rebuild themselves when injured."

Eighty-two years later, Ezhov and Dr. Maya Safarova were treating the man at the cardiology center for his coronary heart disease. His patient history included the story of the accidental shooting, so doctors did a CT scan to check it out, which revealed the stowaway bullet. But the bullet had left no sign of neural damage -- further evidenced by the man's successful career as an award-winning engineer. 

"High-speed missiles, like a bullet, can cause great damage and usually do," explains Dr. David Ross, an emergency physician at Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs, Colo. "However, because they are high-speed, they generate a lot of heat. That heat usually means the missile is sterile -- meaning it is unlikely to serve as a basis for infection if it stays in one place for many years. So if it did not cause much damage, which it apparently didn't, it was unlikely to cause him ongoing troubles."

A weird little detail: Ezhov notes that the during his engineering career, the man oversaw construction of ballistic missles.

Doctors at the Russian cardiology center decided that at this point, the bullet didn't need to be removed -- after all, he was in good condition, Ezhov noted, and he had been doing well for decades. Besides, even his scar wasn't affecting his life negatively -- the bullet did leave a scar under his nose, but his curved, Roman nose keeps it invisible, Safarova said in an email. 

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When twins Danielle and Nicole Fisher gave birth to baby boys within minutes of one another, people wondered whether it was the result of some sort of special twin telepathy. After all, what are the chances that two young women would get pregnant within weeks of one another and then deliver 13 minutes apart?

The duo insists they didn’t consciously plan to get pregnant together. Twenty-three year old Nicole Fisher put it down to the “twin thing.” “It just has something to do with that twin communication,” she told her hometown New Jersey newspaper, The Courier-Post.

But twin experts aren’t ready to explain this away with ESP.

“I’ve heard of these things happening before,” said Nancy Segal, a professor of psychology at California State University at Fullerton and author of “Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior.” “It’s fascinating. But I don’t think there’s any kind of ESP going on.”

Segal thinks the more likely explanation is shared genetics. While genes aren’t destiny, she said, they tend to greatly influence our lives.

“Twins’ lives tend to be in synch, particularly identical twins,” Segal said. “And you could see how genetics might come into play when it comes to the ease of conception, for example.”

Segal has interviewed hundreds of twins and for the most part she hasn’t come across many instances of any special sort of twin communication.

“They can have very close connections,” Segal said. “They can spend a lot of time together because they get along so well.”

It’s not just the power of genes that makes twins feel so close, said Ricardo Ainslie, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “The Psychology of Twinship.”

“They grow up together in the same developmental context,” Ainslie said. “That’s very powerful. And because of it there will always be a kind of intimacy between twins that doesn’t exist between siblings that are different ages.”

Model Lauren Scruggs, who lost her left eye after being struck by an airplane propeller, has a fraternal twin sister, Brittany. In a recent post on CaringBridge.org, their mom, Cheryl Scruggs, reported that Brittany’s left eye had been twitching for days. “She knows it’s because of their deep connection she and Lo have, and God allowing her to go through this with her at the ‘twin’ level,” she wrote.

Still, the whole mythology of twin ESP can be oppressive, Ainslie said. Some twins even feel they come up short because they can’t communicate telepathically.

“When I interviewed twins,” Ainslie said, “I asked about this phenomenon. And what is interesting is that many twins seemed to feel that they didn’t measure up to that myth. They’d say ‘My twin and I try to communicate in these ways. Maybe we’re just not as twin-like as other twins.’” 

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Petr David Josek / AP

There are weepy drinkers, inappropriately affectionate drinkers, giggly and goofy drinkers. But there's one type of reveler you really want to avoid: the angry drinker. New research suggests how to spot one. 

Impulsive, live-in-the-moment types are likely to become aggressive when they're intoxicated, according to a new study from Ohio State University's Brad Bushman, a professor of communication and psychology at the school. "We already know that alcohol increases aggression. And people who have aggressive personality traits also tend not to think about the consequences of their actions," Bushman says. "You put the two together, and it's really a toxic mix." 

The average age of the study's 495 volunteers was 23, all of whom described themselves as social drinkers and none of whom had any past or present drug, alcohol or psychiatric-related problems. They each took a questionnaire designed to measure which of the participants were future-focused, and which were more impulsive. Half of the volunteers were given alcohol mixed with orange juice; the other half were given orange juice with just a teensy bit of alcohol -- but researchers sprayed the rims of the glasses with alcohol so it smelled like a full-on alcoholic drink (genius).

Then they played a little game: The participants were told they were playing against an unseen same-sex opponent in a speed reaction test, and that the winner got to give the loser an electric shock -- harmless, but still a little painful. (But, actually, they were playing against the researchers themselves.) As the game wore on, the shocks got longer and more intense, making it seem like the opponent was getting meaner and meaner with every win. The more impulsive the participants had rated themselves, the more likely they were to retaliate by upping the intensity and length of the shocks they sent the "losers." 

“The less people thought about the future, the more likely they were to retaliate, but especially when they were drunk.  People who were present-focused and drunk shocked their opponents longer and harder than anyone else in the study,” Bushman explained. "Alcohol didn’t have much effect on the aggressiveness of people who were future-focused."

While the impulsive types who were not intoxicated did up the intensity of the shocks, it wasn't to the same degree as the impulsive folks who were drunk.

"If you carefully consider the consequences of your actions, it is unlikely getting drunk is going to make you any more aggressive than you usually are," Bushman said.

That's because alcohol is a disinhibitor, explains New York City psychiatrist and regular TODAY contributor Dr. Gail Saltz. It doesn't cause a personality trait; it reveals what's already there, hiding somewhere inside your personality. A drunk friend may appear to be acting out of character, but we don't know what that person might be keeping under wraps, Saltz explains.

Think you're only an angry drunk when you're throwing back, say, shots of tequila? It's not that simple, says Bruce Bartholow, associate professor of psychology at University of Missouri College of Arts and Sciences. (Bartholow led a study we wrote about earlier this year on alcohol and behavior.) Bartholow says there isn't much research looking at how drinking an unfamiliar type of alcohol changes cognitive function.

"There’s a social influence on your drunken behavior," Bartholow explains. "People drink different kinds of things in different situations. If you're at a dinner party at your boss's house, you're probably not going to be doing shots of tequila." There, you might be drinking a good sauvignon blanc, so you learn to associate the experience of drinking wine with mind-your-manners behavior. "There's a difference between what it feels like to be drunk off of wine and what it feels like to be drunk off of shots of tequila because the situations are vastly different," Bartholow explains. 

Related: 

Post-booze blackout, how people fill in the blanks

Blame it on the alcohol? Maybe not

Why do hangovers seem so much worse as we get older?

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The pen is said to be mightier than the sword. But an unusual case report has shown that a pen may be mightier than stomach acid.

The case, which appeared in the British Medical Journal Case Reports, described a 76- year-old British woman sent to a GI specialist because of weight loss and diarrhea.

She was diagnosed with severe diverticulosis, a condition that's common in older people in which small pouches bulge out from the colon. But when doctors did a scanning test of her belly they noticed something strange: "A linear foreign body in the stomach." (Click here for photos.)

When asked about it, the woman remembered accidentally swallowing a black felt-tip pen 25 years earlier. (In case you're wondering, dentures and toothpicks are two of the most common items that adults accidentally swallow.)

According to her gastroenterologist Dr. Oliver Waters, who authored the case report, she was standing on her stairs using an uncapped pen to poke a spot on her tonsils. She was also holding a hand mirror to guide the pen to the exact spot. Somehow, while doing this, she lost her balance and stumbled. The fall managed to push the pen down her throat. It glided down her gullet and found a home in her tummy.

She told her husband and her doctor what had happened, but they were skeptical of the story. X-rays done at the time were normal and found no trace of the pen. Flash forward to the present, to a different doctor and even better stomach-scanning technology to investigate the case of the missing marker. More than two decades later a scan hit pay dirt: The pen.

Although the woman's current digestive problems had nothing to do with the marker she had unintentionally downed, doctors decided to remove it anyway. Their rationale was a case in the medical literature of a child accidentally swallowing a ball-point pen that bore a hole in his bowel. Incredibly, the pen had stayed in her stomach for 25 years without causing any significant damage to her GI tract, Waters says.

After bathing in stomach acid for a two-and-a-half decades, the pen was corroded and the plastic was flaky, but, amazingly, the pen still had usable ink and could write!

"This case highlights that plain abdominal x-rays may not identify ingested plastic objects and occasionally it may be worth believing the patient's account however unlikely it may be," the report advises doctors.

Write on!

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Nigel Roddis / Reuters

Wolverhampton Wanderers' Ronald Zubar challenges Manchester United's Nani during their English Premier League soccer match in Manchester, on Dec. 10.

The stress of watching the final nail-biting minutes of a Manchester United match is enough to trigger life-threatening anxiety for one 58-year-old superfan, according to a new report published this week in the British Medical Journal. 

The woman experienced palpitations, panic, light-headedness and even a "sense of impending doom" toward the end of the most high-profile matches played on Man U's home turf at Old Trafford Stadium, particularly when the opposing teams were rival clubs like Chelsea or Manchester City. "On these occasions she considered leaving the stadium because she felt so unwell," write the authors of the report, including Akbar Choudhry, who treated the woman. In contrast, when her beloved Red Devils were playing a team that didn't stand a chance, her symptoms became barely noticeable. 

As a result of her football fanaticism, doctors were able to diagnose her with Addison's disease, which means her adrenal glands do not produce enough of their hormones, including cortisol. The drop in cortisol triggers an Addisonian crisis, a medical emergency that can be life-threatening. 

Addison's disease is difficult to diagnose, and as many as 60 percent of those with the disorder are seen by at least two clinicians before the diagnosis is even considered, according to the BMJ report. That's likely because the most visible symptoms include fatigue, lethargy and a mild depression, all of which are characteristics of many chronic conditions. But this woman's severe anxiety during high-stress games led her doctors to diagnose her with Addison's disease. 

Doctors treated the woman with cortisol replacement therapy -- fortunately for her, the start of her treatment happen to coincide with the start of Manchester United's 2011/12 season, allowing her to attend games without any Addison's symptoms. "Luckily, the patient was on holiday for United's 6-1 defeat by local rivals Manchester City in October," Choudhry said in a report on BMJ.com.

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Getting hammered to the point of not remembering much, if anything, about it is a pretty common experience for some people on college campuses or during a long holiday weekend. Reconstructing what happened during a bout of booze-fueled amnesia can either make for a hilarious movie plot like "The Hangover" or an interesting research project.

Although not inspired by the Hollywood blockbuster, a recent study looked at alcohol-induced memory blackouts hoping to learn how people "fill in the blanks" afterward and whether this information is accurate. Researchers found that people frequently turn to  unreliable sources to piece together these forgotten memories.

In the study, published in the journal Memory, 280 British college students completed an online survey. Students were asked whether they had experienced either a partial blackout  --  where they remembered bits and pieces of what happened after they started drinking, or a total one -- forgetting everything about what they did or saw until they woke up the next day.

Among the students who drank, 24 percent of them admitted to having a total blackout while 37 percent had a partial one. Drinking a lot within a short period of time typically causes a blackout, explains lead author Robert Nash.

Researchers found that blackout sufferers were somewhat more likely to ask people who had also been intoxicated for details of the hazy episode rather than asking people who weren't drunk but had also witnessed it. Nearly 44 percent said they had seen a photograph or video reminding them of what happened.

"I was surprised at how highly motivated people were to reconstruct these forgotten alcohol-soaked experiences, despite knowing that doing so can often lead to considerable embarrassment or panic," admits Nash, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Surrey in Guildford, England.

He says asking other people who were there is often the only way we can find out what happened. But that relying on friends or acquaintances who were probably drunk can make their recollections less than 100 percent reliable.

Unreliable sources can lead to memory errors and sometimes false beliefs about behaviors during a forgotten time-period. This may be true not only for boozy blackouts but for other past experiences, whether it's cobbling together childhood memories or even in cases of wrongful conviction.

Interestingly roughly three-quarters of the study participants admitted they might have unintentionally made up information when a friend passed out, such as claiming the person had sex with a stranger or puked on someone.

And nearly 17 percent of blackout sufferers later discovered they were misled by incorrect information, often coming from friends.

But having a blackout and being eager to know what happened, seems perhaps to change people's perspectives on whether a particular source could be trusted, Nash points out. "So we place faith in information sources that we would othewise consider highly untrustworthy."

His advice? "Be aware when reconstructing events of whether you are placing trust in a source because someone is truly reliable or because that person is the only option."

Related: 

• About last night: Biology of the booze blackout
• Why do hangovers seem so much worse as we get older?
• I'll never drink again! Never mind. Cheers! 

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There's really no other way to put this: During a Pilates stretching exercise, a 59-year-old woman said her body "swallowed" one of her breast implants. Sounds like something we just made up, but the woman's case is the subject of an unbelievable report, just published online in the latest New England Journal of Medicine. 

The woman was a breast cancer survivor who'd had a double mastectomy, and afterward had gotten breast implants. During a Pilates routine, she was doing a Valsalva maneuver, a breathing technique in which a person takes a deep breath and holds it while bearing down. (In other words, you're going through the motions of exhaling forcibly, but without letting any air escaping through the mouth or nose.)

Doing a Valsalva maneuver increases pressure inside your chest cavity. In this lady's case, enough pressure built to essentially send her right implant through the thin tissue between her ribs and into the space in between the lungs. This left her more perplexed than anything -- where did it go?! Fortunately (and incredibly), she said upon arriving in the the emergency department of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore that she wasn't experiencing any chest pain or shortness of breath. 

"I can picture how this could happen in a freak occurrence," says Dr. Anthony Youn, a Michigan-based cosmetic surgeon and frequent contributor to msnbc.com, who didn't treat this patient but gave us his professional opinion on what the heck happened here.

Note that Youn called this a "freak occurrence" -- this is not exactly going to happen to your average Pilates lover, as this woman's case had some extra complications. She'd recently undergone a surgery to repair her heart's mitral valve, a procedure that typically involves some separating of the muscles that run between the ribs. 

"What likely happened in this instance is that the breast implant was placed under the chest muscle and on top of the ribs, an extremely common practice in breast reconstruction," Youn says. "When the patient Valsalva'd, the pectoralis (chest) muscle likely contracted and pushed the implant through the space between her ribs," which was particularly fragile after the valve surgery.

"The weakened scar tissue was easily torn, and the strength of the pectoralis muscle pushed the implant deep into her chest," Youn explains. 

The woman was treated at Johns Hopkins, where surgeons retrieved the implant from within her chest and put it back where it belonged. 

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Getty Images stock

By Markham Heid
Men's Health

A little snap judgment goes a long way toward making friends: According to a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, all it takes is 20 seconds to decide whether or not a stranger is trustworthy.

Researchers recruited 24 couples and asked each person to talk about a time when he or she had suffered. Meanwhile, cameras recorded the reactions of the speaker’s partner. A separate group reviewed the videos, and was able to identify fake compassion in the reacting partners within 20 seconds.

How to Earn Her Trust

After researchers took DNA samples of the study participants, it turned out that 60 percent of the least-trusted participants lacked a gene receptor, GG genotype, that may control your compassion and empathy. The receptor helps regulate your body’s level of oxytocin, which past studies have linked to feelings of trust, empathy, and generosity, explains Alexsandr Kogan, Ph.D., a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and the study’s lead author.

Of those rated most trustworthy, 90 percent carried the gene. But since the gene is only linked to perceptions of sincerity, it doesn’t mean you’re unsympathetic if you don’t have it, the study authors say. Observers could weed out the sincere from the dishonest because, Kogan says, “there are certain behaviors that are found to be signals of trust and support.

Whether you’re dealing with a salesman, a new colleague, or a blind date, you can identify bogus behavior if you know what to look for, says Marc Salem, Ph.D., a behavioral psychologist and the Men’s Health resident expert on non-verbal behavior. Look out for these signs:

1. Inconsistent behavior
“If normally someone is very still, and suddenly they become very animated, or vice versa, that change-up is a red flag,” Salem says. The same goes if a person is speaking smoothly and rapidly, but suddenly their speech becomes more deliberate or clipped. “Shifts from the norm are red flags for deceit,” he adds.

2. A steady gaze
“When people think or contemplate, it’s natural for them to break eye contact and look around,” Salem explains. If a person’s gaze is too constant, they’re either not listening or consciously trying to earn your trust. Both are signs of insincerity.

3. Not enough mouth
Coughing, clearing the throat frequently, or any other gesture of covering the mouth can indicate that a person is trying to hide something, Salem says. The same goes for a shoulders-down, hunched-body pose. That’s a sign of caution, he adds, and indicates a person is not opening himself up completely.

4. A quick smile
A genuine smile changes a person’s whole face, Salem says. Their eyes light up, and their cheeks and eyebrows rise along with the corners of their mouth. That smile also takes a few seconds to fade. A fake smile appears in an instant, and disappears just as quickly.

How to Spot a Liar

More from Men's Health:

How to Detect a Liar

How to Spot a Lying Politician

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Whether the public blames Wall Street or its bankers for bad decisions depends a lot on the group's level of cohesion as well as its mindfulness, or ability to "think," suggests a new study.

The researchers wanted to find out how people choose to blame large collectives, such as a major corporation, political party, governmental entity, professional sports team or other organization, while still treating members of those groups as unique individuals. They found that the more people judge a united group as having a "mind"— the ability to think, intend or plan — the less they judge each member as having their own capacity to complete acts requiring such a mind. The opposite also held.

"We thought there might be certain cases where instead of attributing mind to individuals, people actually attribute mind to the group," study researcher Liane Young, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College, said in a statement.

Young gives a political example of a group mind. "If you're a Democrat, you might think that the Republican Party has an agenda, a mind of its own, but that each individual Republican is just following the crowd, incapable of independent thought," Young said. "That's the trade-off we're after, between group mind and member mind."

To test their theory, the researchers conducted four experiments on a total of 129 participants via online questionnaires. In the studies, participants had to rate the extent to which various groups had a mind, and the extent to which each group member individually had a mind. These groups ranged from corporations, like McDonald's, to sports teams, such as the New York Yankees, to government entities, such as the U.S. Navy and even groups like Facebook.

Participants also rated each group's cohesiveness, and in some of the studies, they indicated how morally responsible the group was for its collective decisions and how morally responsible the group's members were for both personal decisions and collective decisions.

Results showed that to the greater extent subjects judged a group to have a "mind," the less likely they were to judge each member of that group as having an individual mind; as such, the participants tended to assign each individual within the group less responsibility for their own actions.

This suggests that people assess a group as a whole differently than they do the individuals in the group, and use that judgment when doling out blame, the researchers said.

For instance, on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much), participants gave Burger King's "group mind" an average of 3.55 and their "member mind" as a 5.45; as such, when asked how morally responsible Burger King as a group is responsible for collective actions, participants gave an average rating of 5.9 and a 2.85 for how responsible individual members were for their own personal actions. The U.S. Congress got the same group-mind rating and a 5.9 for member mind, while the U.S. Navy scored a 3.6 and 5.1 for group and individual mind, respectively; Twitter users scored an average of 2.7 and 6.35 for group and individual mind, respectively.

"When people consider corporations to be mindful entities, this gives them moral rights, such as the right to contribute to political campaigns, as was granted to them by the Supreme Court last year, as well as legal responsibilities," study researcher Adam Waytz of Northwestern University said in a statement.

"We think the topic of whether people think of groups as having minds has a number of implications for legal decisions, such as regarding conspiracy—a charge that requires collective intent, how people think about social movements and their members, as well as judgments of corporate personhood," Waytz added.

The study was published in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science.

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Rca / RCA

Pop stars like Ke$ha use vocal fry to drop their voices down into lower notes. Researchers say the croaky sounds are becoming more prevalent in college-aged women's speech.

The influence of pop singers like Britney Spears and Ke$ha may actually be changing the way some young women speak, suggests a (small) new study.

The report, recently published online in the Journal of Voice, examines the prevalence of a speech pattern called "vocal fry," the creaky, rough, guttural sound that pop singers sometimes use to slip into lower notes. Nassima Abdelli-Beruh, one of the study authors (along with Lesley Wolk and Dianne Slavin) and a speech scientist at Long Island University, describes the sound like "rattled, popping air." 

Can you hear in your head the way Spears croaks the line "Oh baby, baby" in "Baby One More Time"? (If not, watch the video here.) The first two seconds of the Ke$ha hit "Blah Blah Blah" is another good example. And as our pals over at Maddow Blog point out, you can hear vocal fry in practically every word out of Kim Kardashian's mouth. Listen to an example from the study provided by Abdelli-Beruh here:

Vocal fry has historically been considered a speech disorder, the study authors note, often seen in patients with vocal cord damage. Specifically, the speech habit can cause contact granulomas, benign but painful lesions on the vocal cords.

But this study suggests the quirk is becoming normalized. Researchers from Long Island University recorded speech from 34 college-aged women, and found that more than two-thirds of them used the croaky "vocal fry" sounds, usually dipping into the low, creaky register at the end of a sentence.

"My colleagues and I have noticed this speech pattern in our young female college students," says Abdelli-Beruh, adding that about 99 percent of their students are female. After publishing the data on vocal fry in college women, she and her team did a similar study on college men, and found that the guys are much less likely to speak in croaks. "Interestingly, some research indicates that in some dialects of British English, male speakers use fry more often than female. So maybe it is also a gender marker," Abdelli-Beruh says.

It's likely also a generational marker. "(A)necdotally, vocal fry is judged to be annoying by those who are not as young as the college students we tested," she says. "My son, who is a teenager, listens to 92.3 NOW in NYC. I noticed the way the voice said 'NOW' on the radio (is) clearly glottal fry."

The volunteer speakers didn't use vocal fry when speaking vowel sounds, suggesting the trend is more habitual or social than anything else. "It is possible that these college students have either practiced or observed this vocal register and modeled it to match popular figures," the authors write, noting that future research will explore the social nature of vocal fry. But the continuous use of the guttural speech could put these young women at risk for vocal cord damage. (It's tough to produce the sound loudly, so the croak may cause increased vocal cord tension and fatigue.) 

Have you noticed croaky, throaty sounds in young women's speech? Share your favorite example in the comments, or on our Facebook page.

UPDATE: Best comment so far, from Facebook fan Amelia Price: "These girls sound like a bunch of neurotic dolphins who do not make sense." Brilliant. Can you top that?

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By Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience

When the office slacker makes a mistake that could cost them a pay raise — do you truly feel bad, or do you have to work to hide your smile?

If you smiled, you've just experienced schadenfreude, a bit of enjoyment at the misfortunes of others. And now researchers know more about why we experience this seemingly odd emotion. Turns out, it can be a sure way to make you feel better about yourself. It's a self-affirming boost.

"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, adding that it could be due to thinking the other person deserves the misfortune, and so becoming less envious of them or feeling better about one's self.

In the study, van Dijk, of Leiden University in the Netherlands,and his colleagues had 70 undergraduate students (40 women and 30 men) read two interviews about a high-achieving student who was likely to land a great job. Then they read an interview with the student's supervisor revealing that the student had suffered a big setback in his/her studies. Next, they rated their level of agreement with five statements meant to gauge their schadenfreude, such as: "I enjoy[ed] what happened to Marleen/Mark"; "I couldn’t resist a little smile."

Those with low self-esteem (assessed at the study's start) were both more likely to be threatened by the overachieving student, and to experience schadenfreude. However, the researchers found that regardless of self-esteem, those who felt more threatened by this student also felt more schadenfreude.

The researchers thought that perhaps the reason for this was that schadenfreude was self-affirming for these "threatened" individuals.

As a follow-up experiment, the researchers gave about half of the students a self-affirmation boost by shoring up their beliefs about what the students had indicated was a very important value to them, and then asked them to repeat the same interview-reading stint.

Participants with low self-esteem were again more likely to experience schadenfreude, and also more likely to feel threatened by the high-achieving student. However, those who had been self-affirmed were less likely than those who hadn't to reap pleasure when reading about the other student's academic slip.

"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, van Dijk told LiveScience. "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."

If you feel an evil sort of glee at the slip-ups of another, are you a bad person? Well, van Dijk says that just about all of us experience schadenfreude at some point in our lives.

"We know that it's very good to feel empathy and sympathy for people, so if you feel schadenfreude without any sympathy or compassion for that other person," that would not be good, van Dijk said. "Our society thrives on compassion and empathy."

While some of us get a kick out of the small blunders of a colleague, say, others experience schadenfreude due to another's grave misfortunes, as van Dijkhas found in research yet to be published.

The current study is detailed in the December 2012 issue of the journal Emotion.

When have you experienced schadenfreude? Tell us on Facebook.

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Bas Czerwinski / AP file

Monique van der Vorst, paralyzed since age 13, says a crash two years ago reversed her paralysis. Um. We have so many questions.

It sounds like a plot right out of a TV movie: A woman paralyzed since the age of 13 miraculously regains feeling in her legs and is able to walk again after being injured in a traffic accident.

But that’s exactly what 27-year-old Monique van der Vorst says happened to her two years ago. Van der Vorst had turned to hand-cycling after losing feeling in her legs as a teen. She got so good that she won two silver medals in the Paralympics.

Two years ago while she was on the road training for the 2012 Paralympics, Van der Vorst was mowed down by a speeding bicyclist.

While in the hospital after the collision with the bicyclist, van der Vorst says she suddenly developed a tingling in her legs -- and within a year she was walking again. This week the announcement came that she’d joined a pro-cycling team and was looking forward to competing at the Olympics as an able-bodied athlete.

Van der Vorst’s doctors haven’t been able to come up with an explanation for her miraculous recovery -- and neither could any of the doctors interviewed by msnbc.com.

With the caveat that it’s impossible to comment on a specific patient without seeing actual medical records, physicians agreed that it was unlikely that anyone who had lost all feeling in their lower extremities could be healed by being hit hard in an accident.

“I have never heard of a case of damage to the spinal cord where someone lost feeling and strength in their legs and then had a second accident that gave them feeling back,” said Dr. Michael Boninger, professor and chair of the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and director of the rehabilitation institute at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “The fundamental truth is that accidents don’t cause damaged nerve cells to regenerate.”

Still, Boninger added, “I would have to also say that there’s a lot in medicine that we don’t know and a lot we have yet to learn.”

The cases where you do see recovery tend to be those in which patients still have some feeling and ability to move right after a spinal injury, said Dr. Bruce Dobkin, professor of neurology and director of the Neurologic Rehabilitation and Research Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If some sensation and movement is retained after such an injury (as in most of the athletes injured on a football field), recovery of walking is likely in 90 percent of cases,” he added. “The process of improvement after such an injury can take up to a year after the incomplete cord injury.”

Van der Vorst says she initially lost feeling in her legs after suffering nerve damage from an ankle operation when she was 13. That problem was compounded by a later car accident in which her spine was injured.

If a person’s peripheral nerves -- the ones that run from the spinal cord to the extremities -- are damaged, they can at least partially regenerate, Dobkin said. “The longest nerves, the ones that move the toes and ankles, may take 18 months to partially regrow, but do not always extend far enough to improve voluntary movement,” he explained. “So, rehab specifically aimed at improving whatever voluntary movement is available can benefit a patient at any time, but is most valuable in the first 12 to 18 months after an injury.”

What do you think of van der Vorst's recovery story? 

Related: 

• Paralympian, un-paralyzed by crash, now eyes Olympics
• 'Exoskeleton' lets paraplegic student walk at graduation

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