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Psychology
intermediate

Compassion, guilt and innocence: An fMRI study of responses to victims who are responsible for their fate

Kai Fehse et al. (2014)

Published
Nov 14, 2014
Journal
Social Neuroscience · Vol. 10 · No. 3
DOI
10.1080/17470919.2014.980587
View Original

At a GlanceAI

fMRI study tests how perceived victim responsibility shapes compassion, guilt, and feelings of innocence toward victims.

SummaryAI

This study examines how people respond emotionally when a victim is seen as responsible for their own misfortune, focusing on compassion, guilt, and innocence. Using fMRI, it links these moral-emotional judgments to underlying brain responses during exposure to such victims. The work is relevant to how blame influences prosocial concern and moral self-evaluation, offering a neural window on why some victims elicit less compassion when responsibility is attributed to them.

Method SnapshotAI

Functional MRI was used to measure brain activity while participants responded to victims varying in perceived responsibility for their fate.

BackgroundAI

Basic knowledge of social cognition and moral emotion concepts (e.g., blame, compassion, guilt) and introductory fMRI/neuroscience literacy.

In Collections

Psychology41 papers

The Belief in a Just World

In this collection I gather (mostly) psychological studies devoted to people’s fundamental belief that the world is just. This construct, it seems to me, quite strongly affects our perception of the world and, importantly, our reaction to ongoing events — especially when we start blaming others, guided implicitly by precisely this motive. The collection includes both curated works, which at some point I read carefully and can say something sensible about, and new works being published on the topic.

ES
Evgeny Smirnov