An Agent Harms a Victim: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study on Specific Moral Emotions

Abstract

The statement: "An agent harms a victim," depicts a situation that triggers moral emotions. Depending on whether the agent and the victim are the self or someone else, it can lead to four different moral emotions: self-anger ("I harm myself"), guilt ("I harm someone"), other-anger ("someone harms me"), and compassion ("someone harms someone"). In order to investigate the neural correlates of these emotions, we examined brain activation patterns elicited by variations in the agent (self vs. other) and the victim (self vs. other) of a harmful action. Twenty-nine healthy participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while imagining being in situations in which they or someone else harmed themselves or someone else. Results indicated that the three emotional conditions associated with the involvement of other, either as agent or victim (guilt, other-anger, and compassion conditions), all activated structures that have been previously associated with the Theory of Mind (ToM, the attribution of mental states to others), namely, the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, the precuneus, and the bilateral temporo-parietal junction. Moreover, the two conditions in which both the self and other were concerned by the harmful action (guilt and other-anger conditions) recruited emotional structures (i.e., the bilateral amygdala, anterior cingulate, and basal ganglia). These results suggest that specific moral emotions induce different neural activity depending on the extent to which they involve the self and other.

Deontological and altruistic guilt: Evidence for distinct neurobiological substrates

“…These findings are consistent with previous functional neuroimaging studies (Kédia et al, 2008;Moll et al, 2007;Shin et al, 2000;Takahashi et al, 2004] reporting a direct involvement of the anterior cingulate in the experience of guilt. Here, we found increased activity in the most ventral and dorsal portions of the cingulate cortex, which, respectively, represent the affective and cognitive divisions of this brain structure .…”

Neuroscience and ethnography: an interdisciplinary revision and a cognitive proposal based on compassion research in Mexico

“…The fMRI brain activations observed in parietal, frontal, temporal and cerebellar regions analyses were similar to those reported for the Mexican civilian samples and other groups (Immordino-Yanga et al, 2009;Kedia et al, 2008;Kim et al, 2009;Lutz et al, 2008;Moll et al, 2006). Insular activation was manifested only in female officers, which suggests that the police institution may homogenize attitudes and behavior as psychometrically-measured, but does not homogenize the brain function or the social perception observed in the ethnography (see Figure 4).…”

“…Neuroimaging designs to study compassion have included: pictures and oral narratives that depict or describe psychological and physical pain (Immordino-Yanga, McColla, Damasio, & Damasio, 2009;Kedia, Berthoz, Wessa, Hilton, & Martinot, 2008); having the subject read compassioneliciting statements (Moll, de Oliveira-Souza, & Eslinger, 2003); asking the subject to discriminate between facial expressions denoting suffering and those that don't (Kim et al, 2009); subjects who practice Buddhist metta (loving-kindness) meditation (Lutz, Brefczynski-Lewis, Johnstone, & Davidson, 2008;Weng et al, 2013); and subjects undertaking charitable and generous decisions (Moll et al, 2006).…”

Guilt-Specific Processing in the Prefrontal Cortex

“…Although emotions were induced indirectly by the reliving of respective affective experiences from the past, without referring to the specific emotion's name, the subjective ratings clearly indicate that this method of inducing the target emotions during scanning was highly efficient. In this way, our study goes beyond previous neuroimaging experiments that focused primarily on judgmental rather than affective aspects of moral processing, including guilt-related processing, by presenting subjects during scanning with scripts of hypothetical scenarios of prototypical social or moral transgressions (Takahashi et al 2004;Moll et al 2007;Kedia et al 2008;Burnett et al 2009). These studies found activations in several brain regions associated with social cognition, ToM, and emotional processing, generally shared with other moral conditions, but critically, they did not report an involvement of the 2 specific prefrontal regions related to guilt here, confirming our interpretation that these regions are linked to an individual affective experience of guilt that probably would not be induced in sufficient intensity by reading hypothetical scenarios.…”

“…During fMRI, participants were later prompted by their own keywords and asked to relive vividly the emotion experienced during the target event. Unlike other paradigms targeting more evaluative moral processes by asking participants to judge hypothetical scripts of social or moral actions (e.g., Takahashi et al 2004;Moll et al 2007;Kedia et al 2008;Takahashi et al 2008;Burnett et al 2009), this procedure allows the induction of a genuine, personally relevant feeling of guilt.…”