Brain activation associated with pride and shame.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Self-referential emotions (shame/guilt, pride) offer personal evaluative insights.
• These emotions involve social and self-referential processes.
• Previous research often compared valence-specific processes using external stimuli.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate valence-specific neural correlates of shame/guilt and pride.
• Examine brain activity during autobiographically evoked self-referential emotions using fMRI.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on 25 healthy volunteers.
• Task included negative (shame/guilt), positive (pride), and neutral conditions.
• Each condition involved a cue, autobiographical remembrance, and a distractor image.

Main Results:

• Both pride and shame/guilt activated emotion-processing circuits (amygdala, insula, ventral striatum) and self-referential regions (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex).
• Emotion circuits showed higher activation for pride than shame/guilt, potentially due to hedonic experience or self-positivity bias.
• Ventral striatum activation was similar for both pride and shame/guilt.
• Medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate regions were activated by both emotions, reflecting self-referential and autobiographical aspects.

Conclusions:

• Autobiographically evoked self-referential emotions engage fundamental emotional and self-referential brain circuits.
• With the exception of the ventral striatum, core emotional circuits were more engaged during pride than shame/guilt.