Self-conscious emotion influences moral conscious

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between moral conscious and self conscious emotion such as shame and guilt, and to investigate the neural mechanism of moral conscious using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Healthy adult participants were investigated with NIRS as they were presented brief stories including description of deviant behavior and were asked to image what happened before and after the stories and to write down the added stories of their images. There were three conditions: self deviant condition, other deviant condition and control condition. The story in each condition consisted of content related to social deviant situation. Self evaluation score of shame and guilt in self deviant condition was significantly higher than that in other deviant condition. The results also showed that arousal of self conscious emotion brought an increase of oxygenated hemoglobin concentrations in the prefrontal area. Especially, concentration change of oxygenated hemoglobin in the prefrontal area under self deviant condition increased more than that under other deviant condition. This result showed arousal of self conscious emotion would have been related to activation of prefrontal area. These findings suggest that it will be important to arouse self conscious emotion for production of moral conscious.