In December 2025, a research team led by the Department of Psychology at Sun Yat-sen University and the Faculty of Psychology at Beijing Normal University published a research paper titled “Human neurocomputational mechanisms of guilt-driven and shame-driven altruistic behavior” in eLife (a top-tier journal, CAS Q1). The eLife editorial team highly evaluated the academic significance of this study, describing the findings as “important” and the evidence as “compelling.” Furthermore, the eLife press team wrote and published a dedicated news feature highlighting this research (https://elifesciences.org/for-the-press/0e8faebe/scientists-unravel-neural-networks-that-guide-guilt-and-shame-driven-behaviours).
In social interactions, when individuals cause harm to others through their actions, they often experience a series of moral emotions and adjust their subsequent behaviors accordingly. Among these, guilt and shame (also known as “losing face”) are regarded as two core moral emotions that are widely involved in processes such as norm compliance, cooperation, apology, and compensation. Although both often co-occur following moral violations, extensive psychological research indicates that they differ significantly in cognitive appraisal, motivational direction, and behavioral consequences (Haidt, 2003; Tangney & Dearing, 2003).
Existing studies point out that guilt focuses more on the harmful consequences of an individual’s behavior toward others, whereas shame is directed more toward one’s self-image and how it is evaluated by others. This functional difference suggests that guilt and shame may serve different adaptive problems: guilt prompts individuals to repair the undue harm caused to others, while shame helps individuals avoid social devaluation and reputation damage (Landers et al., 2024; Sznycer, 2019). However, questions remain: Which cognitive factors trigger guilt and shame respectively? How are these emotions translated into specific compensatory altruistic behaviors? The underlying neurocomputational mechanisms remain unclear.
It is particularly noteworthy that in real-world social situations, moral violations often involve both harm and responsibility. When multiple people jointly cause a negative outcome, how an individual integrates these two types of information to generate varying intensities of guilt or shame—and subsequently influence compensation decisions—is a key question in moral emotion research. Addressing this gap requires a combination of neuroimaging and computational modeling to systematically reveal the formation and behavioral translation processes of guilt and shame at a mechanistic level.
Researchers first found that both the degree of harm and the level of responsibility significantly enhanced individuals’ experiences of guilt and shame. However, finer-grained analysis revealed an asymmetry in how these cognitive factors influence emotions: the effect of harm on guilt was significantly stronger than on shame, while the effect of responsibility on shame was significantly stronger than on guilt (Figure 1). Within a unified experimental framework, these results directly validate the core prediction of functionalist theory: guilt is more sensitive to the actual harm inflicted on others, whereas shame is more sensitive to the responsibility the individual bears within the social evaluation system.
Further analysis of compensatory behavior showed that although both guilt and shame promote compensatory altruistic behavior, the driving force of guilt on compensation is significantly stronger than that of shame. This difference was not due to differences in emotional intensity, but rather reflected a fundamental difference in their behavioral conversion efficiency.
Figure 1. (A) Harm has a stronger effect on guilt compared to shame. (B) Responsibility has a stronger effect on shame compared to guilt. (C) Guilt has a greater impact on compensatory behavior compared to shame. (D) There was no significant difference in the intensity of guilt and shame experiences at the overall level.
To characterize the latent psychological computational processes underlying compensatory decisions, researchers constructed and compared multiple computational models. The results showed that the optimal model assumes individuals integrate information using a “Harm ÷ Number of Responsible People” computation during decision-making—essentially estimating the “average harm each responsible person should bear.” The modeling results also indicated that in compensatory decisions, individuals tend to ignore their own economic self-interest and instead adjust their behavior around a subjective “baseline of required compensation.”
At the neural level, the study found that the striatum and the posterior insula represent the integrated signal of “average responsibility harm” (Figure 2). Regarding emotional sensitivity, the individual tendency to translate responsibility information into shame was closely related to activity in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and the superior temporal sulcus (STS)—brain regions associated with Theory of Mind (ToM).
Regarding the neural basis of compensatory behavior, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) was involved in both guilt-driven and shame-driven compensation decisions. Notably, the left lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) showed stronger involvement in shame-driven compensatory behavior, suggesting that compensation motivated by shame may involve more strategic processing.
Figure 2. (A) Activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), supplementary motor area (SMA), and temporal pole was significantly correlated with guilt-driven compensation sensitivity. (B) Activity in the dmPFC, SMA, bilateral inferior parietal lobule (IPL), and left lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) was significantly correlated with shame-driven compensation sensitivity. (C) The left lPFC showed a stronger positive correlation trend with shame-driven compensation sensitivity compared to guilt-driven sensitivity.
In summary, by organically combining behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and neuroimaging, this study systematically reveals the differences between guilt and shame in terms of cognitive antecedents, computational mechanisms, and neural implementation. The research validates the core hypotheses of functionalist theory regarding moral emotions.
It should be noted that this study was primarily based on a sample of healthy adults, and the measurement of emotional experience relied on post-hoc reports. Future research could combine real-time emotion measurement, brain stimulation techniques, or developmental samples to further test the causality and universality of these mechanisms. Nevertheless, this study provides important insights for understanding how moral emotions shape social behavior and holds potential application value for interventions in psychological disorders involving guilt and shame, as well as for moral education and the design of social norms.
The first author of the paper is Associate Professor Ruida Zhu from Sun Yat-sen University. The corresponding author is Professor Chao Liu from Beijing Normal University. Other authors include Dr. Huanqing Wang (Ohio State University), Associate Professor Chunliang Feng (South China Normal University), Master’s student Linyuan Yin (Sun Yat-sen University), Master’s student Ran Zhang (Beijing Normal University), and Professor Yi Zeng (Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences).
This work was supported by the Science and Technology Innovation 2030 – “Brain Science and Brain-Like Intelligence Technology” Major Project (2021ZD0200500) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32200884, 32441109, 32271092, 32130045).
Original Article Link: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.107223
Link to Original Article (PDF): [https://elifesciences.org/articles/107223.pdf]
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References
Haidt, J. (2003). The moral emotions. In R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer, & H. H. Goldsmith (Eds.), Handbook of affective sciences (pp. 852–870). Oxford University Press.
Landers, M., Sznycer, D., & Durkee, P. (2024). Are self-conscious emotions about the self? Testing competing theories of shame and guilt across two disparate cultures. Emotion, 24(5), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001321
Sznycer, D. (2019). Forms and functions of the self-conscious emotions. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(2), 143–157. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.11.007
Tangney, J. P., & Dearing, R. L. (2003). Shame and guilt. Guilford Press.