Compassion, guilt and innocence: An fMRI study of responses to victims who are responsible for their fate.

Compassion is a human feeling towards an individual who is suffering. However, the responses toward a victim are not always compassionate and may, for example, be moderated by the perceived responsibility of the victim. In the present study, we investigated the neural correlates of compassion and specifically differentiated the responses to other individuals' misfortunes depending on whether the victim was responsible for the event that occurred. In particular, we identified increased activation of the left insula, medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and adjacent anterior cingulate cortex when the participants read sentences with innocent compared with responsible victims. The reverse contrast revealed increased activation of the bilateral temporoparietal junction, right precuneus, and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). Using a psycho-physiological interaction (PPI) analysis, we demonstrated that in the responsible condition, right dlPFC activation was accompanied by decreased activation in the left insula, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and mPFC. This inverse effective connectivity illustrates the antagonism of the dlPFC and mPFC in compassion-related appraisal of external events. More specifically, our results imply that regulatory mechanisms of compassion are related to the perception of responsibility.