Shame and guilt are moral emotions that promote individual interests and maintain social norms. Previous studies suggested that these emotions are universal but that their specific experience and underlying neural mechanisms may be culturally influenced. However, little is known about the cross-cultural neural mechanisms of these emotions, including their commonalities and differences. Understanding these mechanisms may elucidate the evolutionary significance of these emotions and clarify how culture influences them. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis of 62 neuroimaging studies to identify the neural correlates of shame and guilt across East Asian cultures (EAC) and Western cultures (WC) using seed-based d mapping with permutation of subject images (SDM-PSI). We found that shame and guilt shared brain locations with significant activation in the middle cingulate cortex (MCC) and insula regardless of cultural background. However, we also observed differences in the brain activation patterns between the two cultures. Shame elicited stronger activation in the MCC in EAC than in WC. Guilt elicited stronger activation in areas related to theory of mind, such as the temporal pole and precuneus, in WC than in EAC. These results indicate that, although shame and guilt share similar neural mechanisms, the cultural contexts can modulate the activation patterns of the relevant brain regions. These findings provide insights into the universal and culturally specific neural mechanisms underlying shame and guilt. We hope that this study helps to promote mutual respect among people from different cultures and understand what we have in common as well as how and why we differ.

The neurobiology of typical moral cognition involves the interaction of frontal, limbic, and temporoparietal networks. There is still much to be understood mechanistically about how moral processing is disrupted; such understanding is key to combating antisociality. Neuroscientific models suggest a key role for attention mechanisms in atypical moral processing. We hypothesized that attention-bias toward alcohol cues in alcohol use disorder (AUD) leads to a failure to properly engage with morally relevant stimuli, reducing moral processing. We recruited patients with AUD (n = 30) and controls (n = 30). During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants viewed pairs of images consisting of a moral or neutral cue and an alcohol or neutral distractor. When viewing moral cues paired with alcohol distractors, individuals with AUD had lower medial prefrontal cortex engagement; this pattern was also seen for left amygdala in younger iAUDs. Across groups, individuals had less engagement of middle/superior temporal gyri. These findings provide initial support for AUD-related attention bias interference in sociomoral processing. If supported in future longitudinal and causal study designs, this finding carries potential societal and clinical benefits by suggesting a novel, leverageable mechanism and in providing a cognitive explanation that may help combat persistent stigma.

Over the past years, research has shown that primary (high callousness and low anxiety) and secondary (high callousness and anxiety) variants of CU traits may be associated with opposite amygdala activity (hypo- and hyper-reactivity, respectively). However, their differences in amygdala functional connectivity remains largely unexplored. We conducted a Latent Profile Analysis on a large sample of adolescents (n = 1416) to identify homogeneous subgroups with different levels of callousness and anxiety. We then performed a seed-to-voxel connectivity analysis on resting-state fMRI data to compare subgroups on connectivity patterns of the amygdala. We examined the results in relation to conduct problems to identify potential neural risk factors. The Latent Profile Analysis revealed four subgroups, including the primary and secondary variants, anxious, and typically developing adolescents. The seed-to-voxel analyses showed that the primary variant was mainly characterized by increased connectivity between the left amygdala and left thalamus. The secondary variant exhibited deficient connectivity between the amygdala and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, temporo-parietal junction, premotor, and postcentral gyrus. Both variants showed increased connectivity between the left amygdala and the right thalamus but exhibited opposite functional connectivity between the left amygdala and the parahippocampal gyrus. Dimensional analyses indicated that conduct problems may play a mediating role between callousness and amygdala-dmPFC functional connectivity across youths with already high levels of callousness. Our study highlights that both variants differ in the functional connectivity of the amygdala. Our results support the importance of disentangling the heterogeneity of adolescents at risk for conduct problems in neuroimaging.

In the past decades, a growing interest of neuroscience on moral judgment and decision-making has shed new light on the neurobiological correlates of human morality. It is now understood that moral cognition relies on a complex integration of cognitive and affective information processes that implicate a widely distributed brain network. Moral cognition relies on the coordination of several domain-general processes, subserved by domain-general neural networks, rather than a specific moral cognition system subserved by a specific neural network. In this chapter, we will first briefly review what is currently known about the "moral brain," i.e., the network of brain regions consistently implicated in studies of moral cognition, which include decision-making, affective processing, mentalizing, and perspective-taking processing regions. We will then review the evidence of the impairments found in this network in individuals with psychopathy, a condition whose characteristics indicate profound disturbances in appropriate moral processing. We will present data from neuroimaging studies with forensic/clinical, general population, as well as child and adolescent samples, which seem to converge to support the notion that the moral dysfunction observed in individuals with psychopathy may stem from a disruption of affective components of moral processing rather than from an inability to compute moral judgments per se.

Previous studies have examined the neural correlates of receiving negative feedback from peers during virtual social interaction in young people. However, there is a lack of studies applying platforms adolescents use in daily life. In the present study, 92 late-adolescent participants performed a task that involved receiving positive and negative feedback to their opinions from peers in a Facebook-like platform, while brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Peer feedback was shown to activate clusters in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), superior temporal gyrus and sulcus (STG/STS), and occipital cortex (OC). Negative feedback was related to greater activity in the VLPFC, MPFC, and anterior insula than positive feedback, replicating previous findings on peer feedback and social rejection. Real-life habits of social media use did not correlate with brain responses to negative feedback.

The present study combined a novel hypothetical investment game with functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine how moral conflict biases our real decision preference when it is not obvious or explicitly presented. Investment projects were chosen based on their prior subjective morality ratings to fit into 2 categories: a high level of moral conflict (HMC) or a low level of moral conflict (LMC). Participants were instructed to invest high or low amounts of capital into different projects. Behavioral and neural responses during decision making were recorded and compared. Behaviorally, we observed a significant decision bias such that investments were lower for HMC projects than for LMC projects. At the neural level, we found that moral conflict-related activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was higher in the HMC condition than in the LMC condition and that reward-related activity in bilateral striatum was lower. Dynamic causal modeling further suggested that the moral conflict detected in the ACC influenced final decisions by modulating the representation of subjective value through the ACC's connection to the reward system.