How often do you think back to a past event, whether it was moments, days, or years ago, wishing it had turned out differently? It’s incredibly hard to recall that moment without feelings of regret overwhelming you.
Maybe you sat down for what you thought would be a nice chat with an old friend at your favorite hangout. The conversation turned to an event from your teenage years where, according to your friend, you said something unusually harsh about them in front of others. Although you thought you were being funny, it turned out your words were hurtful. Somehow, you and your friend moved past this, but you now realize that your attempt at humor had a significant impact on your friend's self-esteem. If only you could change the past to avoid that unfortunate event.
Understanding Regret
According to a new study by Temple University's Crystal Reeck and Duke University's Kevin LaBar (2024), "Regret involves a sense of responsibility and agency." While you might think this only pertains to feelings about the past, Reeck and LaBar note that it can be both "experienced" and "anticipated" (p. 1). When you anticipate regret, you imagine how you would feel if a choice you made didn’t turn out as well as you hoped. Instead of regretting your past moment of carelessness, you could use regret to consider what might happen if, now sitting with this person, you were to bring up the experience to try to work it through. Or should you just leave it be?
Reeck and LaBar suggest that regret of either type doesn’t have to lead to an overwhelming set of negative emotions. Through the process of emotion regulation, you can reduce your brain's tendency to dwell on the "what if?" process that drives feelings of regret.
One way that might not immediately come to mind involves thinking of negative events as a "portfolio." Instead of focusing on one single outcome, past or future, you take an approach that allows you to see that one incident in a larger context. You may have done that hurtful thing to your friend, but the rest of your relationship is filled with happy memories and deep feelings of connection. The Temple-Duke research team suggested that this big-picture approach can help people feel better about the decisions they make that don’t, or don’t seem like they will, turn out well.
Testing the Big Picture Approach
A gambling scenario was used as the framework for the Reeck and LaBar study. Participants were asked to decide how much to bet on two different options, each with varying chances of financial gains or losses. The experimental team controlled the context of these bets by instructing participants to view each bet either as a single occurrence or as part of the entire block of trials. They also showed participants the outcome of their bet, an outcome that was predetermined. Emotional reactivity was measured both by subjective ratings (how happy or sad participants felt) and physiological responses (skin conductance). Participants showed their willingness to take risks in future trials based on the results of their previous bets.
These were the two conditions. See what you would do in each of them.
Multiple: "Imagine you are considering one of the financial decisions in this task right now. One way to think about this approach is to remember that all that matters is that you come out ahead in the long run a loss here and there won't matter in terms of your overall portfolio. You need to focus on making good decisions overall and think about the long run. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. You should focus on these financial decisions in the context of the other monetary decisions you will all make today."
Single: "Tell yourself that this trial is the only bet that matters, that this one might be the one you get paid for. Therefore, you could win the positive amount, but you could just as easily lose the negative amount and lose that money. Approach each trial as if you are making just this one choice in today’s study... Just let any thoughts or emotions about that particular choice occur naturally, without trying to control them. You should focus on the financial decision before you at that moment, in isolation from any context from the other decisions in this study" (from Online Supplemental material).
If you lost, would you feel more or less regret in the single versus multiple condition, and how would the instructions influence your future decisions?
The results revealed that using the emotion regulation strategy of thinking in terms of multiple trials helped participants react less and feel better about their past bets, even if those bets didn’t work out. Both strategies helped reduce aversion to loss in later bets to a similar degree.
Using Multiple Trials to Improve Health
The authors found that "regret can be managed through different levels of control, and adjusting our emotions can change how we feel regret when making uncertain decisions." Thinking about all your significant decisions as part of a pattern can, based on these findings, significantly change your mindset enough to feel better about those decisions. In terms of future choices, knowing that things may come down to a flip of the coin, in turn, can also help you feel less emotional should that choice turn out to be the wrong one.
It might be a stretch to extrapolate from this small experimental study on artificial risks to how you feel over life experiences with real consequences. However, the idea that you don’t have to live with regret as an overwhelming feeling may help you feel better about the outcomes you didn’t like. Using the example of your friend, you could either mention that one past event or instead, recall the many wonderful times you shared together.
What If I Don’t Want to Feel Better?
In summary, regret may be a natural result of recalling events you wish had gone differently. However, by taking a broader approach, you can experience more positive, and satisfying, emotions.