Cognitive neuroscience of social emotions and implications for psychopathology: Examining embarrassment, guilt, envy, and schadenfreude

Abstract

Social emotions are affective states elicited during social interactions and integral for promoting socially appropriate behaviors and discouraging socially inappropriate ones. Social emotion-processing deficits significantly impair interpersonal relationships, and play distinct roles in the manifestation and maintenance of clinical symptomatology. Elucidating the neural correlates of discrete social emotions can serve as a window to better understanding and treating neuropsychiatric disorders. Moral cognition and social emotion-processing broadly recruit a frontotemporo-subcortical network, supporting empathy, perspective-taking, self-processing, and rewardprocessing. The present review specifically examines the neural correlates of embarrassment, guilt, envy, and schadenfreude. Embarrassment and guilt are selfconscious emotions, evoked during negative evaluation following norm violations and supported by a fronto-temporo-posterior network. Embarrassment is evoked by social transgressions and recruits greater anterior temporal regions, representing conceptual social knowledge. Guilt is evoked by moral transgressions and recruits greater prefrontal regions, representing perspective-taking and behavioral change demands. Envy and schadenfreude are fortune-ofother emotions, evoked during social comparison and supported by a prefronto-striatal network. Envy represents displeasure in others' fortunes, and recruits increased dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, representing cognitive dissonance, and decreased reward-related striatal regions. Schadenfreude represents pleasure in others' misfortunes, and recruits reduced empathy-related insular regions and increased reward-related striatal regions. Implications for psychopathology and treatment design are discussed.

Interfering with activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex via TMS affects social impressions updating

“…Interestingly, this region is also involved in processing socially relevant emotions (such as arrogance or guilt) beyond basic emotions (Jankowski & Takahashi, 2014;see also D'Agata et al, 2011). Accordingly, alterations in the functioning or structural abnormalities of the medial prefrontal cortices have been associated with abnormal biases in social evaluation that characterize psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia (Brüne, 2005;Pia & Tamietto, 2006;Yamada et al, 2007) or depression (Foland-Ross et al, 2014;Holmes et al, 2012;Thoma, Norra, Juckel, Suchan, & Bellebaum, 2015).…”

Social comparison in the brain: A coordinate‐based meta‐analysis of functional brain imaging studies on the downward and upward comparisons

“…In addition, we explored several other sources, including (1) direct searches on the names of frequently occurring authors, (2) the bibliography and citation indices of the pre-selected articles, and (3) the reference r Luo et al r r 442 r list of related reviews [Aoki et al, 2015;Du and Chang, 2015;Falk et al, 2012;Fehr and Camerer, 2007;Insel and Fernald, 2004;Izuma, 2013;Jankowski and Takahashi, 2014;Kedia et al, 2014b;Rilling and Sanfey, 2011;Ruff and Fehr, 2014;Swencionis and Fiske, 2014;Tricomi and Sullivan-Toole, 2015]. The search resulted into 119 potential studies, which were further assessed according to the following criteria: (i) subjects were free from psychiatric or neurological diagnoses and neuropharmacological influence; (ii) subjects performed tasks in the context of social comparison; (iii) fMRI was used as the imaging modality; (iv) whole-brain generallinear-model-based analyses (rather than region of interest [ROI] analyses) were applied; (v) statistical models for contrasts of downward/upward social comparison or relevant parametric analyses were reported; and (vi) activations were presented in a standardized stereotaxic space (Talairach or MNI).…”

“…Downward comparison is most likely done to fulfill the motivation of self-enhancement. This type of comparison elevates positive emotion such as relief or schadenfreude and reduces anxiety [Amoroso and Walters, 1969;Crocker and Gallo, 1985;Gibbons, 1986;Jankowski and Takahashi, 2014]. Accordingly, downward comparison often enhances or protects subjective well-being [Suls et al, 2002;Wills, 1981].…”

“…Upward comparison is most likely done to fulfill the motivation of self-improvement. This type of social comparison invokes threat to the self [Brickman and Bulman, 1977] and provokes negative emotions such as envy [Chester et al, 2013;Jankowski and Takahashi, 2014;Tesser et al, 1988]. In short, downward comparison-being better than others-is often associated with positive feelings, whereas upward comparison-being worse than others-usually triggers negative feelings [Dvash et al, 2010;Swencionis and Fiske, 2014].…”

Behavioural Neurology of Personality Disorders: A Bi-dimensional Model

“…• Remorse/guilt is the ability to learn from one's own negative behaviour in a way that positively influences future behaviour [193].…”