Brain Activation Associated with Pride and Shame

Abstract

Background: Self-referential emotions such as shame/guilt and pride provide evaluative information about persons themselves. In addition to emotional aspects, social and self-referential processes play a role in self-referential emotions. Prior studies have rather focused on comparing self-referential and other-referential processes of one valence, triggered mostly by external stimuli. In the current study, we aimed at investigating the valence-specific neural correlates of shame/guilt and pride, evoked by the remembrance of a corresponding autobiographical event during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Method: A total of 25 healthy volunteers were studied. The task comprised a negative (shame/guilt), a positive (pride) and a neutral condition (expecting the distractor). Each condition was initiated by a simple cue, followed by the remembrance and finished by a distracting picture. Results: Pride and shame/guilt conditions both activated typical emotion-processing circuits including the amygdala, insula and ventral striatum, as well as self-referential brain regions such as the bilateral dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. Comparing the two emotional conditions, emotion-processing circuits were more activated by pride than by shame, possibly due to either hedonic experiences or stronger involvement of the participants in positive self-referential emotions due to a self-positivity bias. However, the ventral striatum was similarly activated by pride and shame/guilt. In the whole-brain analysis, both self-referential emotion conditions activated medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate regions, corresponding to the self-referential aspect and the autobiographical evocation of the respective emotions. Conclusion: Autobiographically evoked self-referential emotions activated basic emotional as well as self-referential circuits. Except for the ventral striatum, emotional circuits were more active with pride than with shame.

Resting-State Brain Fluctuation and Functional Connectivity Dissociate Moral Injury from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

“…Our previous work studying brain responses to guilt scenarios showed that the guilt ratings were positively associated with activations in dorsal mPFC and supramarginal gyrus that is included in IPL [16]. Roth et al [17] investigated the neural correlates of autographical recall about shame and found that shame versus neutral condition elicited stronger activation in mPFC and PCC as well as weaker activation in IPL. Interestingly, studies on shame and guilt [15] have also reported findings in amygdala and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) that are hyper-responsive in PTSD [18].…”

The rise of moral emotions in neuropsychiatry

“…19 In one fMRI study, shame/guilt conditions, as well as pride, activated an emotional circuit including the amygdala, the insula, and the ventral striatum, and the bilateral dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. 68 In another study that attempted to disentangle the neural correlates of shame from guilt, both were associated with increased activations in the temporal lobes. However, shame activated most specifically the medial and inferior frontal gyrus, while guilt lead to greater activity in the amygdala and the insula.…”

Using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy to Assess Brain Activation Evoked by Guilt and Shame

“…In the present study, we used guilt and shame as examples to validate studying moral emotions by using fNIRS. Guilt and shame are two typical moral emotions, which have been extensively studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) (Takahashi et al, 2004;Finger et al, 2006;Moll et al, 2007;Wagner et al, 2011;Michl et al, 2012;Roth et al, 2014;Bastin et al, 2016;Zhu et al, 2019). We elicited the participants' guilt and shame experience using moral emotional context described by sentences.…”