#1112 Do guilt and shame have a purpose?

Do guilt and shame have a purpose? Shame and guilt serve to make people function more as a group and to follow the agreed social norms.

Many of us spend a large portion of our lives weighed down with shame and guilt and we often wish that they were two emotions we didn’t need to feel. We look at people we consider aren’t burdened with shame and guilt and we wish we could be more like them, without actually knowing if it is true. We curse these emotions and wonder why we have them. Well, in the modern society we live in, they may not be as useful as they once were, but without shame and guilt, we might not have reached the point we are at now.

I’m lumping shame and guilt together here, but they are actually different emotions. Shame is “a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety”. Guilt is the “feeling of deserving blame especially for imagined offenses or from a sense of inadequacy”. (Definitions from Merriam-Webster.) They are connected, but you can also have one without the other. Guilt can be a private emotion because it can be something that we feel ourselves about something we have done. Shame comes about when someone has discovered something that we have done or judged us in some way. Shame doesn’t always lead to guilt, although it can, and guilt doesn’t always follow shame, although it can. They are both negative emotions and they are emotions that we go out of our way to avoid, which is the point of them.

Shame and guilt are also processed in different parts of the brain. FMRI experiments have shown that shame is usually experienced in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and the sensorimotor cortex. Guilt is experienced in the ventral anterior cingulate cortex, posterior temporal regions, and the precuneus. These are some confusing names. What are those parts of the brain responsible for? Let’s look at shame first. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is responsible for working memory, planning, inhibition, and abstract reasoning. The posterior cingulate cortex is involved with spatial memory and emotion. The sensorimotor cortex is involved with movement. Now guilt. The ventral anterior cingulate cortex is involved with attention allocation, reward anticipation, decision making, impulse control, and emotion. The posterior temporal regions are involved with memory, language recognition, and audio and visual processing. The precuneus is involved with episodic memory, self-reflection, and consciousness. The locations of where we feel these emotions gives us a big idea of what they are for.

Shame uses more areas of the brain because it is a more complex emotion. Shame is a response to several external stimuli, a mix of cultural, societal, and many others. Guilt is more of a response to internal stimuli. We have a set of personal rules in our brains and we feel guilt when there is a disconnect between something we have done and a personal rule. When we feel shame, our brain has to filter all of the signals, process them against all of the memories we have of all those cultural and societal norms that we know, analyze what has happened, check and analyze how other people are responding to what we have done, reason what could have happened, then trigger the shame response. With guilt, the brain only has to take what has happened and check it against our list of personal rules that are stored in memory.

So, why do we feel these emotions? Shame is an emotion that helps us work together as a group. Still useful today, but probably far more so than when we were hunter-gatherers. A person on their own would not survive. Groups help each other find food, they communicate, they can hunt game together, they can look after each other when they are sick or old, they can watch out for predators, and so many other things. Early humans needed to live in tribes to thrive and shame was a way of making sure they were more sociable than antisocial. Someone who felt shame would try to avoid being rejected by the tribe, which meant they would be more sociable. Feeling shame helped more people survive and it was passed on. Guilt has a similar purpose. It might be internal, but we feel guilt when we know we are breaking rules that we shouldn’t. That feeling stops us from breaking the rules, which makes us more sociable. If most of the people in a society feel guilt, and shame, the society is more likely to work together and survive. And this is what I learned today.

Photo by Kindel Media: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-man-in-handcuffs-sitting-outdoors-7785074/

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