Abstract
Guilt, a self-conscious emotion, includes self-focused role taking and also correlates with other-oriented role-taking. Excess guilt proneness might be relevant to obsessive compulsive disorders. The white matter (WM) neural correlates of the degree of guilt have not yet been determined. We hypothesized that the WM structures involved in feelings of guilt are associated with social and moral cognition (inferior parietal lobule [IPL], prefrontal cortex [PFC], and cingulate), and aimed to visualize this using diffusion MRI. We investigated the association between regional WM structures (WM volume, and fractional anisotropy, and mean diffusivity [MD]), and feelings of guilt in 1196 healthy, young students using MRI and the Guilty Feeling Scale, which comprises interpersonal situation (IPS; guilt from hurting friends) and rule-breaking situation (RBS; deontological guilt) scores. The primary novel finding presented here is that MD in the right somatosensory and motor cortices from arm to hand were positively correlated with RBS scores. Further, consistent with our hypothesis, RBS scores were positively correlated with MD in the same regions. These results would be predicted by the Macbeth effect, an obsession with dirt leading to hand-washing rituals resulting from guilt, made famous by the Shakespearian character Lady Macbeth. “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” William Shakespeare (Shakespeare, 1606) Macbeth.
Highlights
Guilt, a self-conscious emotion, includes self-focused role taking and correlates with other-oriented role-taking
Morally-relevant information is processed in the inferior parietal lobule (IPL), including the superior temporal sulcus (STS), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC)[11]
We found a significant correlation between the interpersonal situation (IPS) scores and mean diffusivity (MD) using the same analyses described above in the bilateral inferior parietal lobule (IPL), the right prefrontal region in the centre of middle frontal region and post- and precentral regions, and the left posterior cingulate region, using the threshold-free cluster enhancement (TFCE) method with FWE corrected to P < 0.0125 (0.05/4) at the whole-brain level (Table 2 and Figure 2)
Summary
A self-conscious emotion, includes self-focused role taking and correlates with other-oriented role-taking. We hypothesized that the WM structures involved in feelings of guilt are associated with social and moral cognition (inferior parietal lobule [IPL], prefrontal cortex [PFC], and cingulate), and aimed to visualize this using diffusion MRI. Another systematic review of 21 functional and structural imaging studies demonstrated that guilt was more likely to be associated with activity in ventral anterior cingulate cortex, posterior temporal regions, and the precuneus than were other negative moral emotions (e.g. shame and embarrassment)[6]. A previous brain grey matter (GM) anatomical study conducted by our group directly demonstrated that scores related to feelings of guilt in both interpersonal and rule-breaking situations were uniquely and negatively related to regional GM density (rGMD) in the right posterior insula (PI)[7]. Morally-relevant information is processed in the inferior parietal lobule (IPL), including the superior temporal sulcus (STS), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC)[11]
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