And the older we get, the fewer we have, but it’s not because we deal with them any better.
We at theBack Page thought regret was a fuzzy, bile-related, heart-burn inducing, self-inflicted condition we live in all by our lonesome.
Not so, according to psychology, which clearly defines it as “a negative, low-to-moderate arousal (Patel & Urry, 2024), and cross-culturally experienced (Breugelmans et al., 2014) emotion specific to the context of decision making”, as noted by researchers from Cornell University’s Department of Psychology, who have been digging into the specifics.
It’s not the same as disappointment or its closer relative, guilt. It’s “counterfactual”, where we imagine much better outcomes that could have been our lot had we only done something differently.
The good news is that, in terms of the burden, it really does get better with age.
A study undertaken by the Cornell researchers confirmed that older people tended to have fewer regrets based on things they had done, and felt less hot under the collar about them.
They also wanted to see if that was because there was a difference in the way that younger and older people processed long-term and short-term regrets.
Dear reader, there mostly wasn’t.
“Overall, we found only limited support for our hypotheses regarding age-related differences in regret experience and regulation,” they admitted.
For this study, they recruited 90 adults aged 21-89 (63% women) and asked them to nominate five recent (in the last year) and five long-term regrets, and then focus on the single most severe in each category.
As far as negative emotions go, regret is supposed to have its upside because it “can help to steer future decision making by trying to avoid making (similar) mistakes moving forward (Saffrey et al., 2008; Zeelenberg & Pieters, 2007)”.
In this research cohort, however, “older adults were … more likely to say they had no future strategies in mind” and said they were “less likely to try and improve decision quality or to improve decision justifiability”. And neither young nor old reported being likely to use any future-oriented strategies to manage long-term regrets. (So much for upside.)
Research has shown that nine in 10 adults have intense, long-term regrets, usually to do with choices about education or romance. These are either regrets of “commission” (a bad decision we made) or “omission” (missed opportunities).
The former elicit more frequent “intense” or “hot” emotions like irritation, anger and embarrassment; the latter are more Wuthering Heights-type feelings of “intense ‘despair’-related negative emotions (i.e., helplessness, sorrow, or desperation) or ‘wistful’ emotions (i.e., nostalgia, sentimentality, contemplation; Gilovich et al., 1998)”.
Some, but not all, research has suggested that commission regrets tend to fade faster with time than those of omission, which we like to keep close to our bosoms.
Apparently (who knew?), “people have many options for downregulating feelings of regret”. You’ve got your behavioural repair work strategies, where you “course-correct” your behaviour and fix your mistake. And you’ve got psychological repair work strategies where you reflect on what happened in a different way, like seeing the silver lining.
We tend to feel more control over the regrets of commission (I married that person, but then I divorced them) and the ones that originated more recently (I accepted that person’s proposal last week, but I can still call it off).
According to prior research, older people have fewer regrets. They are “more omission-based” regrets (I really should have invested in Apple computers), and less of those regrets are interpersonal than those of their younger compatriots.
And for longer-term regrets, older age was associated with more feelings of a lack of control, less likelihood of these regrets being ones of commission, and less intense “hot” emotions about them.
It’s also known that older people tend more often to see their regrets as unfixable, especially the longer-term ones, but have fewer anticipated regrets when making a decision and fewer, shorter and less intense regrets about every-day decisions than younger people do.
As expected, older age in the Cornell group was associated with fewer recent regrets of commission than younger age and less intense “hot” emotions.
Now, prior research would suggest that this was due to older people putting off making the decisions in the first place, putting less effort into making those decisions, and being happy to settle for “passable”, in lieu of “optimal”, outcomes.
“Since older adults score lower with respect to many decision-relevant capabilities (Bruine de Bruin et al., 2012; Del Missier et al., 2011; Mata et al., 2007), they may be less likely to try and improve their decision approach (e.g., to try harder to make a good choice or consider a wider range of choices) to preserve cognitive resources. This might be the case even if it means investing less to avoid regrettable choices,” the researchers noted in their review of existing literature.
However, in this latest study, “contrary to expectations, we found no age-related differences in the reliance on decision avoidance (DBS; cf. Bjälkebring et al., 2013). For present-oriented strategies to manage long-term regrets, we merely found that older participants were more likely to report no strategy at all,” the researchers wrote.
Existing research said older people also tended to lean into a “positivity effect”, where regretful feelings were resolved by looking at things differently; they thought themselves into being okay with the decisions they’d made. And, unsurprisingly, even decisions made long ago were less likely to hold a sting because they “also tend to misremember past decisions more positively than they were originally experienced (Kennedy et al., 2004; Mather & Johnson, 2000)”.
But the results from the Cornell 90 did not bear this out.
“With respect to present-oriented strategies, counter to both the motivational theory of life-span development and the socioemotional selectivity theory, older adults were less likely to rely on psychological repair work (RBS) or affect-based strategies (DBS),” the authors wrote.
“These effects were mostly driven by older adults describing themselves as less likely to justify their decisions.”
As for the age-related differences in managing these regrets, the answers these people gave did not fit with the theories.
“For present-oriented strategies to manage long-term regrets, we merely found that older participants were more likely to report no strategy at all.”
What they did find, through covariate analysis, was that “indices of cognitive capacity and mental health were associated with several of the observed age differences in regret experience or regulation: Working memory, numeracy, and speed were all linked to the relationship between age and omission-based long-term regrets”.
At The Back Page, whose various authors put us all over the age spectrum, we take comfort in the fact that the years will improve our relationship with regret, and we don’t even have to try.
If you would like to avoid a regret of omission in the future (the peskiest kind), send your surely brilliant Back Page idea to Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au.
