Table 1.
Clinical characteristics of remitted MDD group (N = 21).
Table 2.
Group comparison on demographic and basic clinical variables.
Table 3.
Summaries of moral emotion ratings and response times.
Figure 1.
The MDD group showed higher activation in the right amygdala (panel a) and right posterior insula (panel b) for shame versus guilt compared with the control group (displayed are whole brain maps at voxel-level p = .005 uncorrected and cluster size of 4 voxels).
This was confirmed by a supporting data analysis using the mean regression coefficients of the activated clusters in the amygdala (24, −4, −18) and posterior insula (40, −16, 0). For both regions, there was a moral emotion by group interaction (amygdala: F[1], [37] = 10.5, p = .003; posterior insula: F[1], [37] = 16.9, p<.0001) and no main effect of moral emotion (amygdala: F[1], [37] = .126, p = .725; posterior insula: F[1], [37] = .11, p = .75) or group (amygdala: F [1], [37] = .30, p = .59; posterior insula: F [1], [37] = .79, p = .38). The increased shame-response relative to guilt compared with the control group was also found in the remitted MDD subgroup not currently taking medication (amygdala: p = .01, t[31] = 2.6; posterior insula: p<.0001, t[31] = 4.1).
Table 4.
BOLD fMRI results.