Anticipation of guilt for everyday moral transgressions: The role of the anterior insula and the influence of interpersonal psychopathic traits

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterised by atypical moral behaviour likely rooted in atypical affective/motivational processing, as opposed to an inability to judge the wrongness of an action. Guilt is a moral emotion believed to play a crucial role in adherence to moral and social norms, but the mechanisms by which guilt (or lack thereof) may influence behaviour in individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits are unclear. We measured neural responses during the anticipation of guilt about committing potential everyday moral transgressions, and tested the extent to which these varied with psychopathic traits. We found a significant interaction between the degree to which anticipated guilt was modulated in the anterior insula and interpersonal psychopathic traits: anterior insula modulation of anticipated guilt was weaker in individuals with higher levels of these traits. Data from a second sample confirmed that this pattern of findings was specific to the modulation of anticipated guilt and not related to the perceived wrongness of the transgression. These results suggest a central role for the anterior insula in coding the anticipation of guilt regarding potential moral transgressions and advance our understanding of the neurocognitive mechanisms that may underlie propensity to antisocial behaviour.
This work was supported by Doctoral (SFRH/BD/60279/2009), Post-Doctoral (SFRH/BPD/94970/2013) and Project Grants (PTDC/MHC-PCN/2296/2014) awarded to ASC by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, and by a Doctoral Grant (MR/J500422/1) awarded to LF by the UK Medical Research Council. This work was partially conducted at Psychology Research Centre (UID/PSI/01662/2013), University of Minho, supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and technology and the Portuguese Ministries of Education and Science through national funds and co-financed by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007653). CLS was partially supported during the writing of this paper by an Economic and Social Research Council award (ES/K008951/1). MB was supported by a Fyssen foundation grant. EV is a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder. We would like to thank Prof. Craig Neumann for his help and advice with regard to the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale.