Shame and Exculpation: Integration Modeling and Neuroimaging Approaches to Social Emotions

Imagine just winning the lottery. How much would you give to friends and acquaintances? Would your choice be different if no one knew you had just won? For many people, choices depend upon not only the material outcomes involved, but also on the beliefs and expectations of other people. Violation of these social expectations may result in negative emotions such as shame. Here we study behavior and neural responses to such expectations in the context of a simple economic game—the stochastic dictator game. In the game, a dictator chooses to allocate money between herself and an anonymous recipient while the pot of money available varies across rounds. Crucially, whereas the dictator always knows the pot size, the recipient can find out only with some probability. Behaviorally, we found that dictators gave more to the recipient when there was a greater likelihood of the recipient finding out the true pot size. In addition, subjects indicated a preference to hide the pot size from the recipient when it was large, but to reveal when the pot size was small. Using a model-based approach, we characterized subjects’ preferences as a weighted combination of material payoffs, payoff inequity, and the risk of being shamed. Functional neuroimaging showed that shame risk was negatively correlated with activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, whereas the relief of shame was positively correlated with activity in the striatum. Taken together, these results shed light on the cognitive processes underlying higher-order emotions, as well as their neural substrates