We all have regrets. And they come in myriad shapes and sizes. Some people stew over a minor bad decision, like an unnecessary impulse purchase. Other

Tortured by regret? Here’s a trick to make peace with the past

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2024-09-19 14:30:13

We all have regrets. And they come in myriad shapes and sizes. Some people stew over a minor bad decision, like an unnecessary impulse purchase. Others ruminate over major fork-in-the-road moments, like turning down a potentially exciting career opportunity. For some, regret might be slow-brewing indecision that amounts to loss, like not having children.

That’s the focus of a new study, “Reining in regret: emotion regulation modulates regret in decision making,” co-authored by Temple University’s Crystal Reeck and Kevin LaBar, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University.

The study, published in the journal “Cognition and Emotion” in June, employed a gambling framework — you win some, you lose some — to explore participants’ decision-making processes. Sixty people were individually presented with several pairs of bets, each representing different probabilities of winning or losing real money. They were paid $10 for the one hour of questioning as well as bonus money for points they’d racked up during the experiment. If they answered questions incorrectly, they lost real money and may have felt a pang of — you guessed it — regret.

Reeck and LaBar were able to gauge the intensity of their regret through questioning and psychophysiological recordings that measured how participants’ bodies were experiencing emotion at the time.