Distinct modulatory effects of altruistic and deontological guilt on neural processes of empathy

Empathy essential for successful social interaction, includes affective empathy and cognitive empathy. While basic emotions have been widely studied in relation to empathy, moral emotions such as guilt, which is closely tied to social behavioral regulation, remain less explored. Given guilt's dual interpersonal and intrapersonal regulatory functions, distinguishing its types is crucial for understanding its influence on empathic processing. The present study focused on two distinct guilt emotions, i.e., altruistic guilt (AG) and deontological guilt (DG), using ERPs to investigate the time course of the effects of two emotions on affective empathy (Exp. 1) and cognitive empathy (Exp. 2). We employed auditory stories to induce AG, DG, and neutral emotional states, with affective empathy measured via intensity rating task and cognitive empathy via perspective-taking task. The behavioral results showed significant differences on the performance merely in the affective empathy task, with individuals perceiving stronger emotions from others' faces under the AG condition compared to the neutral condition. Although early ERP measures showed no effects, guilt influenced the later stages of neural processing: the AG condition elicited larger LPP amplitudes than the neutral condition in the affective empathy task, and the DG condition activated greater N400 amplitudes than the AG and neutral conditions in the cognitive empathy task. These novel findings extend previous empathy research and reveal the temporally distinct effects of complex moral emotions on different facets of empathy. • Findings reveal guilt's neural and behavioral effects on empathy. • Guilt types (AG and DG) distinctly shape late-stage neural empathy processing. • AG enhances LPP in affective empathy and DG increases N400 in cognitive empathy.