Abstract
Shame plays a fundamental role in the regulation of our social behavior. One intriguing question is whether amygdala might play a role in processing this emotion. In the present single-case study, we tested a patient with acquired damage of bilateral amygdalae and surrounding areas as well as healthy controls on shame processing and other social cognitive tasks. Results revealed that the patient’s subjective experience of shame, but not of guilt, was more reduced than in controls, only when social standards were violated, while it was not different than controls in case of moral violations. The impairment in discriminating between normal social situations and violations also emerged. Taken together, these findings suggest that the role of the amygdala in processing shame might reflect its relevance in resolving ambiguity and uncertainty, in order to correctly detect social violations and to generate shame feelings.
Highlights
The amygdala is a subcortical nucleus which has been related to a broad variety of functions including facial emotion recognition, social cognition, and reward learning (Adolphs, 2010; Janak and Tye, 2015)
While patients with amygdala damage have been associated with reduced ability to recognize fearful faces (Adolphs et al, 1994; Calder, 1996), they, display spared abilities to recognize the same emotion by other body parts or modalities
In the present single-case study, we tested the role of the amygdala in the perceptual and experiential processing of shame
Summary
The amygdala is a subcortical nucleus which has been related to a broad variety of functions including facial emotion recognition, social cognition, and reward learning (Adolphs, 2010; Janak and Tye, 2015). They show reduced tendency to fixate the eye region (Adolphs et al, 2005; Spezio et al, 2007), ignoring the facial features that are diagnostic when recognizing fearful expressions (Smith et al, 2005). Several neuroimaging studies reported that amygdala activation is sensitive to a wide repertoire of emotional stimuli, including both negatively and positively valenced items (Costafreda et al, 2008; Sabatinelli et al, 2011) and leading to the hypothesis that the amygdala might be involved in arousal processing (Anderson et al, 2003). Amygdala activation is modulated by the arousal of the stimuli (Anderson et al, 2003; Ball et al, 2009; Bonnet et al, 2015) and is coupled with psychophysiological responses (Bonnet et al, 2015)
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