Yu Hongbo, Koban Leonie, Crockett Molly J, Zhou Xiaolin, Wager Tor D
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America.
Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA.
Neurosci Insights. 2020 Sep 17;15:2633105520957638. doi: 10.1177/2633105520957638. eCollection 2020.
Guilt is a quintessential emotion in interpersonal interactions and moral cognition. Detecting the presence and measuring the intensity of guilt-related neurocognitive processes is crucial to understanding the mechanisms of social and moral phenomena. Existing neuroscience research on guilt has been focused on the neural correlates of guilt states induced by various types of stimuli. While valuable in their own right, these studies have not provided a sensitive and specific bio-marker of guilt suitable for use as an indicator of guilt-related neurocognitive processes in novel experimental settings. In a recent study, we identified a distributed Guilt-Related Brain Signature (GRBS) based on 2 independent functional MRI datasets. We demonstrated the sensitivity of GRBS in detecting a critical cognitive antecedent of guilt, namely one's responsibility in causing harm to another person, across participant populations from 2 distinct cultures (ie, Chinese and Swiss). We also showed that the sensitivity of GRBS did not generalize to other types of negative affective states (eg, physical and vicarious pain). In this commentary, we discuss the relevance of guilt in the broader scope of social and moral phenomena, and discuss how guilt-related biomarkers can be useful in understanding their psychological and neurocognitive mechanisms underlying these phenomena.
内疚是人际互动和道德认知中的一种典型情绪。检测与内疚相关的神经认知过程的存在并衡量其强度，对于理解社会和道德现象的机制至关重要。现有的关于内疚的神经科学研究一直聚焦于由各种类型的刺激所诱发的内疚状态的神经关联。尽管这些研究本身很有价值，但它们尚未提供一种灵敏且特异的内疚生物标志物，以适用于在新的实验环境中作为与内疚相关的神经认知过程的指标。在最近的一项研究中，我们基于两个独立的功能磁共振成像数据集识别出了一种分布式的内疚相关脑特征（GRBS）。我们证明了GRBS在检测内疚的一个关键认知前因（即一个人对伤害他人所负的责任）方面的敏感性，该研究涉及来自两种不同文化（即中国和瑞士）的参与者群体。我们还表明，GRBS的敏感性并不适用于其他类型的负面情感状态（例如身体疼痛和替代性疼痛）。在这篇评论中，我们讨论了内疚在更广泛的社会和道德现象范围内的相关性，并探讨了与内疚相关的生物标志物如何有助于理解这些现象背后的心理和神经认知机制。
