Feelings of guilt and shame can lead us to behave in a variety of different ways, including trying to make amends or save face, cooperating more with others or avoiding people altogether. Now, researchers have shed light on how the two emotions emerge from cognitive processes and in turn guide how we respond to them.
Their study was published December 9 in eLife as the final Version of Record after appearing previously as a Reviewed Preprint. The editors say it provides compelling behavioural, computational and neural evidence to explain the cognitive link between emotions and compensatory actions. They add that the findings have broad theoretical and practical implications across a range of disciplines concerned with human behaviour, including psychology, neuroscience, public policy and psychiatry.
Guilt and shame often coexist after we behave in a way deemed to be morally wrong, and serve to prevent those behaviours from recurring. But they differ in their associations with psychological and behavioural responses. Psychologically, shame is associated with higher levels of anxiety, depression and stress, whereas guilt is typically unrelated or negatively related to these issues. Behaviourally, guilt is known for driving altruistic behaviours, such as offering apologies and making amends, while shame is associated less with these behaviours and more with non-cooperative and antisocial responses, including hiding, evasion and self-improvement.
"Extensive studies have documented the psychological processes and neural activities related to our experiences of guilt and shame, but the cognitive antecedents – or preceding triggers – of these emotions and the neural mechanisms behind them remain unclear," says first author Ruida Zhu, an associate professor at the Department of Psychology, Sun Yat-sen University, China.
"Previous research has identified harm – that is, the severity of harm that someone causes – and responsibility – a person's sense of responsibility for causing harm – as triggers for guilt and shame. However, it remains unclear whether those two factors differ in how strongly they influence these emotions. It also remains an open question as to whether the transformation of guilt and shame into behaviour depends on distinct neural activity."
To help address these gaps, Zhu and colleagues developed a novel game to investigate how harm and responsibility elicit guilt and shame, and how these emotions drive compensatory behaviour.
In the game, a participant acted as one of four deciders performing a dots estimation task. If any decider made an incorrect estimate, a 'victim' received an electric shock whose intensity was randomly determined. This task was repeated across multiple trials. Unbeknownst to the participant, the other deciders were confederates and the victim was fictitious. After each outcome, the participant decided how much financial compensation to give to the victim. The level of harm they caused (on a scale of one to four) was manipulated through the intensity of the electric shock, while the level of responsibility for causing that harm (also on a scale of one to four) was manipulated by varying how many of the other deciders also made incorrect estimates.
Participants underwent fMRI scanning while engaging in the compensatory decision-making part of the game. Afterwards, they completed a survey in which they reported their feelings of guilt and shame for different outcomes and rated their perceived responsibility. This experiment allowed the researchers to explore the associations among harm, responsibility, guilt, shame and compensation, and uncover relevant neural activity.
The results showed that the harm caused to victims had a stronger impact on the participants' guilt, while their sense of responsibility for causing that harm had a stronger impact on their feelings of shame. Additionally, higher feelings of guilt in the participants heavily influenced the compensation they decided to offer, supporting the established association of guilt with altruistic behaviours.
Results from the computational modelling approach indicated that harm and responsibility are integrated in individuals in a manner that is consistent with responsibility diffusion – a phenomenon where individuals feel less responsibility personally in making a decision in a group setting compared to on their own – prior to influencing compensation. The fMRI results revealed that brain regions associated with processing inequity (the posterior insula) and value computation (the striatum) encode this integration.
Additionally, the fMRI results showed that participants' guilt and shame-driven compensatory decisions recruited distinct neural activity: shame-driven decisions in particular were more strongly linked to activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex, a region implicated in cognitive control.
"Together, our findings demonstrate distinct effects of harm and responsibility on guilt and shame, as well as differences in the efficiency with which these emotions translate into compensatory behaviours," says senior author Chao Liu, Principal Investigator at the IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, State Key Laboratory, Beijing Normal University, China.
The authors note that there are a few limitations to their study. For example, fMRI cannot establish causality. They say that future studies using brain stimulation techniques, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, are therefore needed to clarify the causal role of brain regions in guilt and shame-driven altruistic behaviours.
"Our current approach in providing computational, algorithmic and neural accounts of guilt and shame has advanced our holistic understanding of these emotions," Liu concludes. "The findings provide greater insight into how guilt and shame can be regulated, with potential implications for the treatment of mental health disorders related to these emotions."
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