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In the consulting room, psychoanalysts deal with powerful affects such as shame, sadness, and guilt. No wonder the analytic literature deriving from this clinical experience is immensely rich. Yet many questions remain largely unanswered. We have but a limited understanding of the processes that sustain these affects, let alone of the way these various emotions are related to each other or of how they differentially rely on self- and other-representations.
In a study published in Cerebral Cortex, Wagner et al. used functional MRI in a sample of fifteen healthy controls to identify brain regions associated with guilt as distinct from sadness and shame. Rather than presenting patients with hypothetical scripts of social or moral actions that they would be asked to rate, participants were queried to elicit and relive in the scanner autobiographical situations accompanied by strong feelings of guilt. Identical procedures were used to probe the two control emotions (shame and sadness). Along with this autobiographical task, participants also performed a task in the scanner aimed at engaging brain regions mediating self- and other-referential processing. Specifically, subjects were presented with adjectives and asked to assess how well each of these words described their friends or themselves. Finally, a trait guilt questionnaire was administered outside the scanner to assess the individual's propensity to guilt.
The authors found that across all three emotions, the autobiographical task activated a common set of regions, engaging areas belonging to what is now commonly referred to as the Theory of Mind (ToM) network. The function of this network is to enable humans to reason about others' states of mind.
In a direct comparison between brain activities observed while subjects were experiencing these emotions, the investigators identified a region in the prefrontal cortex, the right orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), as being specifically associated with the experiencing of guilt