Shame, Guilt and Pride: How the Brain’s Moral Emotions Shape Human Behavior

Shame, guilt, embarrassment and pride are not merely private feelings. According to a new editorial published in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, these so-called moral emotions form a class of affective states that play a fundamental role in regulating social behavior and maintaining group cohesion. Unlike basic emotions, which are primarily tied to immediate survival, moral emotions are inherently social: they are triggered when we evaluate actions, intentions or character traits against shared norms and values. The editorial, written by Laura Franchin of the University of Trento, Irene Messina of Mercatorum University, Alessandro Grecucci of the University of Bari and Valerie Lesk of the University of Bradford, introduces a multidisciplinary Research Topic that brings developmental psychology, clinical science and neuroscience to bear on questions that have too often been studied in isolation.

The authors argue that the empirical literature on moral emotions has been dominated by neurophysiological and cognitive perspectives, leaving developmental and clinical trajectories comparatively underexplored. This imbalance matters, they contend, because moral emotions provide the motivational force that drives individuals to behave in ways that are adaptive not only at the individual level but also for the long-term stability of social systems. From a functional standpoint, moral emotions can be conceptualized as internal regulatory mechanisms that align individual behavior with socially shared expectations. They act as rapid feedback signals, inhibiting behaviors that violate norms and reinforcing those that uphold them, thereby helping groups coordinate without the need for constant external enforcement.

A central subset of moral emotions consists of the self-conscious emotions: shame, guilt, embarrassment and pride. What distinguishes these states is that they require self-reflection and the capacity to evaluate oneself against internalized social standards. They typically emerge when individuals perceive that they have violated a social or moral norm, and they serve as swift corrective signals that guide behavioral inhibition or reinforcement. In this sense, the self-conscious emotions are the psychological machinery through which culture gets under the skin, translating abstract rules about how one ought to behave into visceral, motivating experiences that can be measured in the laboratory and observed in everyday life.

Among these emotions, shame occupies a particularly central and complex position. The editorial draws a sharp conceptual line between shame and guilt, a distinction with a long history in clinical psychology. Guilt is typically action-focused: the person concludes that what they did was wrong. Shame, by contrast, is self-focused: the person concludes that they themselves are wrong, perceiving a global defect of the self rather than a specific misdeed, often accompanied by a sense of being devalued in the eyes of others. This difference has important behavioral consequences. While guilt tends to promote reparative actions and prosocial behavior, shame is associated with withdrawal, avoidance and defensive responses, often disrupting empathic engagement and interpersonal functioning.

The neurocognitive picture reinforces this functional split. Moral emotions are supported by distributed brain networks that integrate cognitive, social and affective processes. According to the event-feature-emotion complexes model, the generation of moral emotions depends on interactions between prefrontal regions, temporal areas and limbic structures, which together support context-dependent evaluation, the representation of social knowledge and affective responses. Consistent with this framework, neuroimaging studies have identified a network including the medial prefrontal cortex, the temporo-parietal junction, the anterior temporal lobes and limbic regions as central to moral cognition. The editorial emphasizes that these are not isolated modules but interacting systems whose coordination produces the rich, context-sensitive experience of moral feeling.

A particularly striking piece of evidence comes from a voxel-based meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies by Piretti and colleagues, cited in the editorial, which shows that both shame and embarrassment and guilt share a common neural substrate centered on the left anterior insula, a region implicated in emotional awareness, interoception and arousal processing. In other words, the felt sense that something morally significant has happened to the self may rely on a shared interoceptive core. Yet the two emotions diverge in their specific neural signatures, suggesting that what begins as a common bodily signal is then channeled into distinct computational pathways depending on the emotion involved.

Those divergent pathways map neatly onto different action tendencies. Guilt is more strongly associated with regions implicated in perspective-taking and social cognition, such as the temporo-parietal junction, fitting its reparative, other-oriented character. Shame and embarrassment preferentially recruit circuits linked to social pain and behavioral inhibition, including the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, the thalamus and premotor regions. Positive moral emotions such as pride, meanwhile, have been associated with reward-related and self-referential networks, suggesting a role in reinforcing socially valued behaviors. The editorial argues that this functional differentiation reflects a broader organizational principle: moral emotions implement distinct action tendencies through partially dissociable neural pathways, with guilt promoting repair, shame and embarrassment favoring withdrawal and inhibition, and pride supporting approach and social reinforcement.

The overlap between shame circuits and those involved in social pain carries particular theoretical weight. Prior work has shown that social exclusion activates neural systems shared with physical pain, and the editorial builds on this insight to propose that shame acts as a signal of threatened social belonging, triggering adaptive reductions in social exposure. Within this framework, shame can be conceptualized as a neurocognitive mechanism that contributes to the regulation of social behavior by constraining norm violations. The authors stress that these distinctions are not merely descriptive but reflect different computational roles within social cognition: moral emotions collectively maintain social cohesion by balancing complementary functions, promoting repair through guilt, reinforcing valued behavior through pride, and inhibiting socially undesirable actions through shame and embarrassment.

Against this neuroscientific backdrop, the Research Topic assembled by the editors sets out to redress the neglect of developmental and clinical dimensions. Among the contributions, Zhang and Zhang investigate the interplay between moral reasoning ability and stress regulation in adolescents using immersive virtual reality, highlighting how developmental factors and situational context modulate physiological arousal and decision-making during social-moral conflicts, and showcasing virtual reality as a tool for inducing physiological arousal under controlled conditions. Sultan and Khan offer a perspective on the development of empathy across childhood and adolescence, emphasizing culturally adaptive strategies and providing a framework for integrating empathy-focused initiatives into clinical, educational and mental health contexts.

Methodological innovation and early childhood round out the collection. Gerdemann and colleagues validate depth sensor tracking of young children’s body posture as a non-invasive, objective measure of expressed emotional valence and arousal, offering developmental researchers a novel alternative to reliance on verbal reports in preverbal or minimally verbal populations. Kang and colleagues explore early moral development in four-to-five-year-old children, examining how mutually beneficial versus self-beneficial scenarios in a sociocultural context influence children’s lying behavior, moral evaluations and predictions. By integrating these perspectives, techniques and applications, the editors argue, the field can move toward a more comprehensive and unified understanding of moral emotions and their role in human behavior, from the first moral evaluations of early childhood to the neural algorithms that bind individuals into functioning social groups.

Subject of Research: The developmental, clinical and neuroscientific study of moral emotions such as shame, guilt and pride

Article Title: Editorial: Moral emotions scrutinized: developmental, clinical and neuroscientific aspects

Article References: Franchin, L., Messina, I., Grecucci, A., & Lesk, V. (2026). Editorial: Moral emotions scrutinized: developmental, clinical and neuroscientific aspects. Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, 4, Article 1897306. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdpys.2026.1897306

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fdpys.2026.1897306

Keywords: moral emotions, shame, guilt, pride, self-conscious emotions, social cognition, affective neuroscience, anterior insula, developmental psychology, empathy, virtual reality, moral development