Human neurocomputational mechanisms of guilt-driven and shame-driven altruistic behavior

Although prior research has examined the psychological and neural correlates of guilt and shame, the cognitive antecedents that trigger them, as well as their transformation into social behavior, remain insufficiently understood. We developed a novel task to investigate how two cognitive antecedents, harm and responsibility, elicit guilt and shame, and how these emotions subsequently drive compensatory behavior, by combining functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with computational modeling in human participants. Behaviorally, we found that harm had a stronger impact on guilt, whereas responsibility had a stronger impact on shame. Moreover, compared to shame, guilt exerted a greater effect on compensation. Computational modeling results indicated that the integration of harm and responsibility by individuals is consistent with the phenomenon of responsibility diffusion. The fMRI results revealed that brain regions associated with inequity representation (posterior insula) and value computation (striatum) encode this integrated measure. Individual differences in responsibility-driven shame sensitivity were associated with activity in theory-of-mind regions (e.g. temporoparietal junction). Guilt-driven and shame-driven compensatory behavior recruited distinct neural substrates, with shame-driven compensatory sensitivity being more strongly linked to activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex, a region implicated in cognitive control. Our findings provide computational, algorithmic, and neural accounts of guilt and shame.