Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

people to first specify in a list events from their past (since the age of sixteen) marked by a deep and powerful private sense of guilt, as well as by the other two emotions.
    Without mentioning by name the actual emotions in question, the team of scientists sought to obtain from the participants descriptions that for instance involved the transgression of rules or damage to others in the case of guilt, situations that jeopardized personal honour or reputation in the case of shame, or themes of loss in the case of sadness. This way, the entries of all participants for each emotion would share basic commonalities but would be free of bias arising from each individual’s personal definition or conception of those three emotions. For each event on their list, the participants then also provided keywords that were supposed to trigger recall of that event. Someone who had cheated in a history exam, say, might have given ‘history’ as their keyword, but they could also have said ‘rain’ if it had been raining during the episode they described. During the scanning procedure, people were prompted with the memory-laden keywords and asked to try to relive the emotion experienced during the guilt-stained event. A similar procedure was used for the other two emotions.
    As you would expect, since the experiment involved evoking memories, when Wagner and his colleagues analysed the brain-imaging data they noticed activity in areas of the brain participating in memory retrieval. But the imaging results also pointed to areas in the anterior part of the brain, in the prefrontal cortex. Roughly speaking, part of the orbitofrontal cortex and parts of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex were engaged during the elicitation of guilt, but, importantly, not during the recollection of shame and sadness (Fig. 4). From what we have learnt about these two regions in the prefrontal cortex, these results are not surprising. Since guilt has to do with choice and moral decision-making, we would expect it to be at work in brain areas that are in general involved in inhibitory control of behaviour, which is necessary when we calculate the consequences of wrongdoing or causing harm. 18
    But can a brain scan indeed convey a deep sense of guilt? And what does it mean to have identified regions in the brain that ‘light up’ when guilt is recalled?

    Fig. 4 Brain activation for guilt. From Wagner et al. , 2011, Cerebral Cortex, by permission of Oxford University Press
    It would be hazardous to claim that by the means of brain imaging we have narrowly mapped the deep seat of guilt, let alone that a particular region is responsible specifically for the feeling of guilt and not, for instance, shame or regret.
    The image of a brain scan that is supposed to have trapped guilt in the brain is not particularly helpful either in understanding why it is so hard to get rid of a nagging sense of guilt, still harder to assuage it.
    But while I was in Rome, I gained a better grasp of the meaning of guilt from another image, a timeless painting in a museum.
    A restless genius
    From Piazza del Popolo, I climbed the many steps of the Pincian Hill. Before my trip to Rome, a sculptor friend of mine, who had a passion for the painter Caravaggio and had developed an interest in guilt, suggested I go to see some of the master’s paintings at the Galleria Borghese. In particular, he recommended I should look at David with the Head of Goliath , a canvas depicting the biblical story of David’s triumph over the Philistine giant Goliath (Fig. 5), which hangs in a relatively small room packed with many other works.

    Fig. 5 Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath © Alinari Archives/CORBIS
    After a long queue outside, I finally made my entry into the building and was happily thrown back in time among extraordinary pieces of Renaissance and Baroque art. Tourists swarmed in the hot rooms, pacing the magnificent marbled floors and walking around statues. When I reached my