Prefrontal-Dependent and Gender-Specific Modulation of Guilt Emotion on Human Early Visual Perception

Abstract

Negative emotions can shape human visual perception, which is mainly investigated using basic emotions such as fear. Whether guilt emotion, which is a negative moral emotion originating late in our evolutionary ancestry, has similar modulatory effects as basic emotions is largely unexplored. Here, we employed a dot estimation task to induce feelings of guilt and subsequently measured the Ebbinghaus illusion strength. The photos of victims’ faces were projected on the central circle of the Ebbinghaus configuration. The results showed that guilt significantly strengthened the illusion effect relative to control condition, which was observed only for female participants playing with same-gender partners and reversed to the opposite pattern with disruption of left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that guilt can sculpt early visual perception in a gender-specific and prefrontal-dependent manner, thus broaden our understanding of guilt emotion and have implications for relevant neuropsychiatric disorders.