Identify the brain areas activated by guilt
It has long been known that the primary emotions – like anger, sadness, joy and fear – are associated with activation of specific brain regions. The more complex emotions such as social emotions, especially typical of the human race, have been so far hardly been investigated with scientific methods. Among these is the social emotions of guilt, which plays a key role in our daily thoughts and actions.
In fact, we are confronted with the guilt every time, implicitly or explicitly, are called to make choices that can affect the lives of others or on common moral rules. In addition, the guilt is relevant also in neurological and rehabilitation: this important aspect of a more general moral sense can be altered by brain damage of various kinds (eg secondary to head trauma, ischemia, tumors, etc..), Leading in patients significant changes in social behavior.
In normal life, the guilt takes on a spectrum of different shades, depending on the circumstances that determine it, in which you can still identify two major components and extreme: that the ethical and altruistic. The first related to transgression of moral norms, without an objective harm to other individuals. The second evoked, for example, situations in which someone suffers from harm, but beyond our responsibility.
An Italian study, conducted in Rome dall’IRCCS Saint Lucia Foundation in collaboration with the Association of Cognitive Psychotherapy, investigated correlations between brain areas and a sense of guilt in its members ethical and altruistic.
The results, already available online, will be published in the international journal Human Brain Mapping. To conduct the research was Bozzali Marco, along with Barbara Basile, Francesco Mancini, Emiliano Macaluso, Carlo Caltagirone, and Richard SJ Frackowiak.
At the Laboratory of Neuroimaging Foundation Saint Lucia has been studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) a group of healthy subjects, aged between 21 and 38 years, underwent a series of visual stimuli can evoke a sense of guilt in its two types investigated. Subsequently, the same stimuli were administered to a new sample of 22 healthy volunteers, aged equal to those of the previous group. All subjects were engaged in a task of emotional identification with the guilt evoked by these stimuli. Regardless of the type of ethical or altruistic, data analysis showed selective activation of two brain regions: the anterior cingulate cortex and the rear. These brain regions known to be involved in higher cognitive functions.
Researchers at Saint Lucia Foundation are then able to identify more precisely the involvement of specific brain regions involved in the two types of guilt under study. That ethical active the insula, the basic structure in the experience of disgust towards external and internal stimuli. This mainly involves the selfless medial prefrontal cortex: an area involved in mental activities of pro-social type, that is related to the interpretation of moods and behaviors of others. The study thus demonstrated that the guilt involves distinct cognitive brain circuits, although probably subject to some individual variability.
The findings open the way to a better understanding of certain individual performance. It will also benefit the explanation of some social behaviors deviant and psychopathological symptoms related to neurological and psychiatric diseases, according to which there could be an altered processing of complex emotions as, indeed, the sense of guilt. A better understanding of the relationship between location of brain damage and behavioral disorders may also have important implications in clinical and neurorehabilitation. “Changes in the moral sense are often the result of some brain damage and even minor head trauma – highlights the prof. Carlo Caltagirone, co-author of the study and Scientific Director of the Foundation Saint Lucia – then understanding the neurobiological basis of guilt us can improve the rehabilitative interventions, cognitive and behavioral turn to patients. ”
Finally, it should be remembered that in the field of psychiatry has been suggested that specific alterations in the development of guilt can contribute to disorders such as obsessive and compulsive behaviors as well as depression. Again, therefore, a more precise understanding of the role played by guilt may facilitate the development of behavioral therapies targeted.
