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Essay on A Decision You Regret

January 1, 2018 by Study Mentor Leave a Comment

The word ‘regret’ means feeling remorse. This word is a very powerful word that sometimes defines a person’s whole life. Regret is a strong feeling that doesn’t easily go away in fact at some points it doesn’t go away at all. Feeling regret about something is not uncommon or unheard of.

Each and every human being at some point in their life has felt regret about one thing or the other. I myself had felt this unpleasant feeling that I am not very fond of. As a matter of fact no person is fond of this unpleasant feeling and yet at some point in their life they have felt it.

However regret with time has turned into a wish that we could have done instead of what we did. This wish is something we always think about and it doesn’t matter that we don’t want to think about it and in our subconscious mind somewhere we are always thinking about it.

Regret is something like I wish I could have handled a situation differently than the way I did in reality. Feeling regret about something that I did is not good at all. In fact, if a person’s life is full of regrets then that person can’t bear himself by thinking about them which impacts the health of that person.

Regret is something that has already occurred in our life and there is no way of going back and correcting it for us.

In my life there are a few situations about which I feel regret and really wish that just somehow I could reverse the time and change what I did. But that is not possible and I have accepted it, well not willingly but as I don’t have a choice but to accept it so I did.

In every person’s life there comes a time when they could have done something better and it does not matter how they handled the situation, there will always be an afterthought about it and it is safe to say that I do have a few situations like that in my life. However there is one thing which I regret the most. I just wish I had enough courage back then to do what I would have done now but at that time I didn’t.

Each and every people have a different definition of love. I have read about it and seen it a thousand times in movies and everything but never really understood it.

I still don’t and that is what I regret about. I once had a chance to understand this beautiful feeling on my own but unfortunately I did not take that chance and because of that till today I haven’t have the luck in experiencing it till today.

Everyone say that love is a beautiful feeling and that everyone deserves to be in love at least once in their whole life and people also say that people get only one chance at everything which makes me wonder that if I have lost my chance to fall in love because of my lack of courage then.

There was a friend in my life who is one of the main reason which made me who I am today. I can proudly say that he was one of my precious people in my life whom I can’t replace ever. However, I am no longer friends with him today because of my stupidity. I will start from the top.

He was my friend who was always there for me whenever I needed and never really asked for anything from me in return. He never asked for anything and because of that I got used to him and up to some extent took him for granted. I am really ashamed of that and regret doing it.

That was the mistake because of which I lost my friend and my only chance to fall in love. He used to understand me so well that he would have understood everything by just looking at me once.

Everything was going fine and yet I never realised that I have taken him for granted. For me I was having an awesome life and never realised the efforts that he put behind so that I can have this awesome life. Then came the fateful day when everything changed.

That day he asked me to meet him. When I reached in the coffee house, he laid his heart out in front of me. I was so stupid that I never saw the signs. I just wished I did because then I would have handled the situation differently.

When I first heard of his proposal, I was shocked and then I declined it quite rudely which I shouldn’t have done at all. After doing that I left. I never realised at that time that what I did. By the time I realised, it was too late and he was gone from my life. I never realised that the way he used to behave was like the way a boyfriend behaves. I do realise it now and I regret it with every breathe I take.

Now I know that the way he loved me, no one can ever love me like that. For him, I was the most important person in his life. He used to get this look in his face each time when he used to see me which reminds me of the way a moon lights up when it sees the sun.

I never realised this fact then but after he left I realised exactly what he did for me. Now I regret everything I did. Now I realise the fact that I could have given him a chance and somewhere, now I feel something for him. I doubt that what I feel for him is love but I can surely say that whatever it is, is something strong because of which I haven’t able to forget it.

It has been a few years since that day but I still remember everything. If I would have handled that situation differently then I have no doubt about the fact that today we would have been the best couple ever. I guess I will never be able to discover this feeling more and will never be able to feel love at that level again. I doubt that in future he will come back to me because it has been years and who knows he may hate me today for what I did. I hate myself for what I did.

Regret is something that is part of a person’s life and I am no different in this case. Without regret a person do not shape the way they are supposed to do. In fact because of the emotion regret, human being matures. I can also say that I have matured because of that incident.

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Have you Burn Crackers this Diwali ? Yes No

I asked hundreds of people about their biggest life decisions. Here’s what I learned

Senior Lecturer in Marketing, University of Technology Sydney

Disclosure statement

Adrian R. Camilleri does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Technology Sydney provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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You make decisions all the time. Most are small. However, some are really big : they have ramifications for years or even decades. In your final moments, you might well think back on these decisions — and some you may regret.

Part of what makes big decisions so significant is how rare they are. You don’t get an opportunity to learn from your mistakes. If you want to make big decisions you won’t regret, it’s important you learn from others who have been there before.

There is a good deal of existing research into what people regret in their lives. In my current project, I decided to approach the problem from the other end and ask people about their life’s biggest decisions.

What are life’s biggest decisions?

I have spent most of my career studying what you might call small decisions: what product to buy , which portfolio to invest in , and who to hire . But none of this research was very helpful when, a few years ago, I found myself having to make some big life decisions.

To better understand what life’s biggest decisions are, I recruited 657 Americans aged between 20 and 80 years old to tell me about the ten biggest decisions in their lives so far.

Each decision was classified into one of nine categories and 58 subcategories. At the end of the survey, respondents ranked the ten decisions from biggest to smallest. You can take the survey yourself here . (If you do, your answers may help develop my research further.)

The following chart shows each of the 58 decision subcategories in terms of how often it was mentioned (along the horizontal axis) and how big the decision was considered in retrospect (along the vertical axis).

In the upper right of the chart we see decisions that are both very significant and very common. Getting married and having a child stand out clearly here.

Other fairly common big life decisions include starting a new job and pursuing a degree. Less common, but among the highest ranked life decisions, include ending a life – such as that of an unborn child or a dying parent – and engaging in self-harm.

Of course, the results depend on who you ask. Men in their 70s have different answers than women in their 30s. To explore this data more deeply, I’ve built a tool that allows you to filter these results down to specific types of respondents.

Read more: How to help take control of your brain and make better decisions

What are life’s biggest regrets?

Much can also be learned about how to make good life decisions by asking people what their biggest regrets are. Regret is a negative emotion you feel when reflecting on past decisions and wishing you had done something differently.

In 2012, Australian caregiver Bronnie Ware wrote a book about her experiences in palliative care. There were five regrets that dying people told her about most often:

• I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me
• I wish I hadn’t worked so hard
• I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings
• I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends
• I wish I had let myself be happier.

This anecdotal evidence has received support from more rigorous academic research. For example, a 2011 study asked a nationally representative sample of 270 Americans to describe one significant life regret. The six most commonly reported regrets involved romance (19.3%), family (16.9%), education (14.0%), career (13.8%), finance (9.9%), and parenting (9.0%).

Although lost loves and unfulfilling relationships were the most common regrets, there was an interesting gender difference. For women, regrets about love (romance/family) were more common than regrets about work (career/education), while the reverse was true for men.

What causes regret?

Several factors increase the chances you will feel regret.

In the long run it is inaction — deciding not to pursue something — that generates more regret . This is particularly true for males, especially when it comes to romantic relationships . If only I had asked her out, we might now be happily married.

Poor decisions produce greater regret when it is harder to justify those decisions in retrospect. I really value my friends and family so why did I leave them all behind to take up that overseas job?

Given that we are social beings, poor decisions in domains relevant to our sense of social belonging — such as romantic and family contexts — are more often regretted . Why did I break up my family by having a fling?

Regrets tend to be strongest for lost opportunities : that is, when undesirable outcomes that could have been prevented in the past can no longer be affected. I could have had a better relationship with my daughter if I had been there more often when she was growing up.

The most enduring regrets in life result from decisions that move you further from the ideal person that you want to be . I wanted to be a role model but I couldn’t put the wine bottle down.

Making big life decisions without regrets

These findings provide valuable lessons for those with big life decisions ahead, which is nearly everyone. You’re likely to have to keep making big decisions over the whole course of your life.

The most important decisions in life relate to family and friends. Spend the time getting these decisions right and then don’t let other distractions — particularly those at work — undermine these relationships.

Seize opportunities. You can apologise or change course later but you can’t time travel. Your education and experience can never be lost.

Read more: Running the risk: why experience matters when making decisions

Avoid making decisions that violate your personal values and move you away from your aspirational self. If you have good justifications for a decision now, no matter what happens, you’ll at least not regret it later.

I continue to ask people to tell me about their biggest life decisions. It’s a great way to learn about someone. Once I have collected enough stories, I hope to write a book so that we can all learn from the collective wisdom of those who have been there before.

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How to Write College Essay about Regret: Reflect on Mistakes

How to Write an Engaging Essay on Personal Regret

We all experience regret, from the smallest decision to the biggest error of our life. Regret has a way of creeping up on us, making us question our actions.

It is important we avoid letting these feelings fester and grow into something worse, such as bitterness or resentment. 

This post has tips that will make it easier to write a college essay on regret and make it a reflective and insightful read.

Why is Your Regret a Good Topic for College Essays?

1. interesting .

Students are often required to write essays containing personal experiences. Such an essay can be extremely interesting and exciting. Even so, describing something that has changed your life or taught you a lesson is quite a good idea.

Many students choose to write about regrets in their lives. Regret can be an excellent topic for an essay because it teaches you so much about yourself and the world around you.

2. Unchangeable facts 

A regretful experience shows you that the past is unchangeable.

Regretful experiences teach people many lessons, such as dealing with failure and adapting to adverse situations.

Going through something regretful is often extremely difficult, but it usually pays off in the end because you will have learned something from it.

3. Inspiring 

Sharing your regretful experience with others can also be inspiring and helpful to them. Reading about another person’s unfortunate situation can help us realize that we are not alone in our struggles.

It shows that someone is always willing to listen if we need help or advice.

4. Educative 

Learning from other people’s mistakes can also help us avoid making our own mistakes. If we can learn from the mistakes of others instead of having to learn from our own mistakes, we will save ourselves a lot of trouble.

You might even want to share your regrets with friends and family.

Does your college essay matter

How to Write a College Essay about a Decision you Regret

1. explain your regret.

Write down the regretful experiences that impacted you and shaped your values, beliefs, or character.

It is important to consider your essay’s tone, style, and voice. The essay’s first sentence should be interesting, engaging, or even exciting. The last sentence should leave a strong impression on the reader.

As you draft, consider your mood. What are you feeling as you write? Are you feeling regretful? Sad? Angry? Or are you feeling happy? If so, how can you express that with language? Use sensory details and imagery to create this mood.

At the same time, think about how your audience might read or react to your story. What emotions will they feel as they read it? What images will they see in their mind as they read your essay’s opening line?

2. Write Intro and Thesis about it

When you are writing an essay and are trying to prove a point, show, or prove something. It is important to use an introduction that states what you are trying to prove.

Writing essays and papers can be very difficult to make the reader believe what you are writing about.

You can use your introduction to tell the reader how you would like them to feel about what you are saying.

The thesis statement is the brief articulation of your paper’s central argument and purpose. You might hear it referred to as simply a “thesis.” Every scholarly paper should have a thesis statement, and strong thesis statements are concise, specific, and arguable.

3. Write Why You Regret it

If you regret something you did, the best way to get over it is to write about it. In this case, you can use your college essay as an opportunity to explain the story behind your mistake and why you have learned from it.

A great regret might have changed your life. It might have influenced who you are as a person today or your future goals. It might even have affected where you end up going to college!

4. Explain the Lessons you picked

Talk about the learning experience rather than just recounting the event itself. Admissions officers read thousands of essays every year, so steer clear of anything that might come across as cliché. For instance, think about how an immigrant story can be enlightening to someone else who recently moved to the States as an immigrant.

Avoid writing about common experiences like scoring the winning goal, losing a championship game, or winning a student election. Instead, focus on specific moments that led to unique growth opportunities in your life.

Here, choose arguments from each side that you can easily oppose or prove false. You must clearly understand what points your opponent will cite and how you can refuse them.

Once again, consider that if there are many such arguments on both sides, you should choose another topic; otherwise, you risk getting stuck in the middle of the work.

What Do you Think about the Regret?

No matter what you decide to do with your life, there will always be something that you could have done differently. There will always be things that you wish you could change. You will always regret something. 

Yet, there is nothing wrong with that! Regret is human nature! It is part of what makes us interesting! We are not perfect! And we all make mistakes! We are imperfect people who live in an imperfect world! 

9 Examples of Regret Decisions to Write About

People make wrong choices every day. Most of the time, these decisions are small and have little consequence on their lives. But sometimes, these choices lead to serious problems such as losing a job, getting divorced, or going to jail.

If you are looking for regret decision examples to write about in your memoir, here are nine ideas:

1. Getting married too young

2. Not getting married young enough

3. Having children too soon

4. Not having children soon enough

5. Staying in an abusive relationship

6. Going out with someone you shouldn’t have dated

7. Putting off a medical procedure that ultimately led to complications or death

8. Smoking cigarettes or doing drugs over an extended period of time

9. Not putting yourself through college.

James Lotta

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The 6 Most Common Regrets People Experience

Research reveals life's most common regrets..

Posted June 11, 2021 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

• Intense, long-term regrets often stem from poorly made big life decisions.
• The biggest regrets tend to relate to social relationships, research suggests, while the most enduring regrets tend to be for actions not taken.
• Regrets can potentially be avoided by making decisions consistent with your values.

Have you ever made a decision that you later regretted? You’re not alone. Most people are familiar with that feeling of emptiness mixed with a hint of anger . Your mind speeds through alternative timelines in which you did something different and things turned out better.

Although many regrets are small and quickly forgotten—such as the stupid comment you made on social media —there are some regrets that endure. They become salient “sliding door” moments for which you can easily envision a better storyline for your life.

Reflecting on the most enduring regrets is important because they usually link back to big life decisions. Each of us is are in control of these decisions—so we can potentially avoid the worst regrets by having a plan. But what are the decisions we’re most likely to regret, and why?

What Do We Regret?

One way that we can learn about life’s biggest regrets is to directly ask people.

A nationally representative study, which asked 270 Americans to describe a significant life regret, found the most commonly reported regrets involved romance (19.3%), family (16.9%), education (14.0%), career (13.8%), finance (9.9%), and parenting (9.0%) (Morrison & Roese, 2011).

Another way that we can learn about life’s biggest regrets is to listen to those who care for the dying. These carers, who spend much of their time in discussion with those in their last act, have a unique perspective.

Perhaps the most well-known example is Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative carer who wrote a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying . In it, she describes the five most common wishes she heard from her soon-to-depart clients.

• I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. Stringently adhering to cultural norms at the expense of your own passions will result in disappointment and bitterness.
• I wish I hadn’t worked so hard . Time is non-refundable so if you spend it working, then you can’t spend it doing more meaningful things.
• I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings . It is only by being open and honest about your thoughts and feelings can you form genuine bonds with other people.
• I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends . It is dispiriting to be disconnected from those who truly understand you and accept you as you are.
• I wish I had let myself be happier . The expectations and opinions of others should not prevent you from being happy with who you are. Moreover, happiness can be found in the journey, not just the destination, which you often never reach.

What Leads to Regret?

A number of features increase the likelihood that a decision will lead to regret.

Feelings of regret in the long-term are more likely for decisions involving inaction; that is, choosing not to do something (Gilovich & Medvec, 1994)—for example, that overseas job you never took or that person you never had the courage to ask out. This kind of regret is enhanced by our imagination , which compares the real world with visions of the best alternative world. You can never know how things would have turned out but your mind can easily paint a rosy picture.

Decisions resulting in poor outcomes produce greater regret when it is harder to justify those decisions in retrospect (Connolly & Zeelenberg, 2002). Some decisions are made quickly, without consulting others or thinking through the options and their possible consequences. When these decisions turn out poorly, you are more likely to lament how easily you could have done something differently.

Regrets often result from decisions that move you further from the ideal version of yourself (Davidai & Gilovich, 2018). The person you want to be is grounded by your values, which reflect the things that are important to you. Some value power, others conformity , others security. Whatever it is, decisions that compromise your values expose you to the risk of regret.

There are a few important take-homes from this discussion. First, the most enduring regrets relate to social relationships. Humans have a biological need to belong and decisions that threaten this sense of belonging are particularly fraught with risk. Nurture your relationships.

Second, the most intense regrets are for decisions that are hard to justify in retrospect. To avoid regrets, it is important to make decisions that are consistent with your personal life rules and values. Even if things turn out poorly, you will know why the decision made sense for you at the time.

Third, the biggest regrets tend to relate to the things you didn’t do, perhaps because you were scared or were too busy working. It’s easier to course correct after taking action than time travel and pursue opportunities you left behind. Give things a go.

Facebook image: True Touch Lifestyle/Shutterstock

Connolly, T., & Zeelenberg, M. (2002). Regret in decision making. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11(6) , 212-216.

Davidai, S., & Gilovich, T. (2018). The ideal road not taken: The self-discrepancies involved in people’s most enduring regrets. Emotion, 18(3) , 439.

Gilovich, T., & Medvec, V. H. (1994). The temporal pattern to the experience of regret. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 67(3) , 357.

Morrison, M., & Roese, N. J. (2011). Regrets of the typical American: Findings from a nationally representative sample. Social Psychological and Personality Science , 2(6) , 576-583.

Adrian R. Camilleri, Ph.D. , is a behavioral scientist who currently works at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Business School.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Personal Experience — A Personal Experience of the Meaning of Regret

A Narrative About Regrets in Life

• Categories: Personal Experience Regret

About this sample

Words: 1117 |

Published: Oct 4, 2018

Words: 1117 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

My biggest regret (essay)

Works cited.

• Davis, T. (2015). The Power of Regret: Reflection and Action. American Journal of Public Health, 105(12), e17–e19. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2015.302907
• Roese, N. J. (2005). Counterfactual Thinking. Psychological Bulletin, 131(1), 133–167. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.131.1.133
• Zeelenberg, M., van Dijk, W. W., Manstead, A. S. R., & van der Pligt, J. (2000). On bad decisions and disconfirmed expectancies: The psychology of regret and disappointment. Cognition and Emotion, 14(4), 521–541. https://doi.org/10.1080/026999300402745
• Gilovich, T., & Medvec, V. H. (1995). The Experience of Regret: What, When, and Why. Psychological Review, 102(2), 379–395. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.102.2.379
• Linley, P. A., & Joseph, S. (2004). Positive change following trauma and adversity: A review. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 17(1), 11–21. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JOTS.0000014671.27856.7e
• Ersner-Hershfield, H., Garton, M. T., Ballard, K., Samanez-Larkin, G. R., & Knutson, B. (2009). Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: Individual Differences in Future Self-Continuity Account for Saving. Judgment and Decision Making, 4(4), 280–286.
• Folkman, S., & Greer, S. (2000). Promoting psychological well-being in the face of serious illness: When theory, research and practice inform each other. Psycho-Oncology, 9(1), 11–19. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-1611(200001/02)9:13.0.CO;2-6
• Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497
• Newman, D. B., & Whiteman, M. L. (2018). Missing Out: The Effects of Missed Opportunities on Regret and Motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(3), 437–461. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000135
• Zeelenberg, M., Nelissen, R. M. A., Breugelmans, S. M., & Pieters, R. (2008). On Emotion Specificity in Decision Making: Why Feeling Is for Doing. Judgment and Decision Making, 3(1), 18–27.

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It’s Time to Make Peace with Your Regrets

• Vasundhara Sawhney

Learn to leave things in the past — where they happened.

For some of us, good things have happened this past year. We’ve been able to spend more time with loved ones, get back into hobbies, and learn new things. But for others, so much has been lost — in work, in social capital, and in life. Many of us are also feeling regret.

• Regret is an emotion we’re all familiar with and it surfaces with action as well as inaction. We tend to feel regret about the things we haven’t done (missed opportunities) more intensely than regret about the things we did do.
• Regret, like all difficult emotions, is neither intrinsically good nor bad. It is the actions we carry out in response to feeling regret that impact our long-term wellbeing.
• To cope with regret and leave the past where it happened we need to: 1) Recognize our feelings and let them out. 2) Look at the past with gratitude rather than the lost opportunity costs. 3) Make regret productive by thinking about what we value and what actions we can take to get closer to the things that matter to us.

Where your work meets your life. See more from Ascend here .

Do we still need to talk about the many ways this pandemic has impacted our lives? I think I’m past that stage. But I do occasionally sit with myself and feel sad, mostly for something that I’ve lost: time. While chatting with a friend recently — over Zoom, of course — we spoke about how we had made so many plans when 2020 began: We set goals for our careers, booked elaborate travel arrangements, and were prepared to celebrate milestone birthdays, including the day I would meet my nephew and my sister’s first child.

• Vasundhara Sawhney is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review.

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Articles & More

How regrets can help you make better decisions, a new book explains what makes people prone to regret and how it affects our lives, for better and worse..

Have you ever regretted something you did or didn’t do in life?

If you’ve lived a long life, you probably carry many regrets, large and small. Some of my own regrets relate to my career ( why did I never apply to medical school? ), past relationships ( why did I lose a good friend over a small spat? ), and parenting ( why didn’t I respond well to my son’s anxiety? ). No matter the regret, it’s hard not to wonder how things might have turned out if I’d only made a different—and better—choice at the time.

Ruminating on past mistakes is a downer and can lead to depression or anxiety if it continues unabated. But a new book by psychologist Robert Leahy, If Only…Finding Freedom from Regret , suggests that regrets don’t always have to bog you down. If you understand how regrets work, recognize their effect on your decision making, and find ways to manage life’s inevitable disappointments, you can suffer less from regret and, instead, use your regrets as helpful guideposts for your life.

“Regret is a part of life, but it doesn’t have to take over and hijack you,” he writes.

The nature of regret

Regret can come in different forms—for something we did (like overeating or hurting our loved one) or something we didn’t do (like not graduating from college or not asking someone out on a date). Most people have a mixture of both types, though the latter tends to make us feel worse, writes Leahy.

According to research , the most common sources of regret involve our education, career, romance, and parenting (in that order). That’s because we tend to regret things that reflect bigger concerns and opportunities in life, rather than what we ate for breakfast.

Culture can affect how people experience regret, too, with people from more individualistic cultures usually having more regrets about their personal situation (like achievement or career) and those in collectivist cultures having more regrets about their relationships. And women and men differ some in how they experience regret, with women typically regretting romantic and sexual relationships more than men and men regretting inaction more than action.

Regret is associated with unpleasant emotions, like sadness, disappointment, guilt, and shame. But people also regard it as one of the most beneficial negative emotions, because it can be instructive. For example, if we regret how we behaved the last time we drank too much, we’re less likely to order a third round the next time we’re at the bar. Or, if we regret yelling at our child when angry, we may take a breath the next time we’re upset and respond with compassion.

Our regrets can teach us about ourselves, help us to avoid repeating mistakes, and encourage us to make better decisions in the future. On the other hand, if we use our regrets to beat ourselves up, or if we ignore them completely, they will not lead to growth. The key is finding the right balance, says Leahy.

“Regret doesn’t have to lead directly to self-recrimination,” he writes. But “never feeling regret is not a sign of wisdom or righteousness. It may be a sign you don’t learn from your mistakes.”

Why some people suffer from regret more

Some of us are more prone to regret than others, and Leahy provides multiple questionnaires within his book to help you identify where you fall on that scale. Though there is no way to eliminate regret completely—and the world would be worse if we did—there are factors that increase our chances of experiencing regret in a more negative way and suffering from it, says Leahy. Here are some of those risk factors.

Not tolerating ambivalence. Many life choices have pros and cons, and there are no guarantees about the future. But, if you can’t stand uncertainty, you are bound to avoid making hard choices, leaving you vulnerable to later regrets.

Falling prey to biases. We all have cognitive biases, but some influence regret more than others. If you suffer a lot from negativity bias (discounting or not even seeing the positives in your life), black-and-white thinking (thinking things are either all good or all bad), or catastrophizing (thinking that if something goes wrong, you won’t be able to handle it), it’s bound to affect how much you suffer regret.


Worrying about “buyer’s remorse” or how bad we’ll feel in the future. If you’re the kind of person who often anticipates feeling awful for making a choice, it may keep you from deciding on a course of action that could bring you happiness, increasing the potential for regret.

Having too many choices. “Regret is an opportunity emotion—the more opportunity we see, the more likely we are to regret something,” writes Leahy. For example, a college graduate with multiple job offers might regret taking one over another, especially if it doesn’t pan out. Having too many choices increases your potential for making the “wrong” one.

Being a perfectionist. If you expect to have an ideal, happy life all of the time and are not easily satisfied, you will be more prone to regret. “Maximizers” (people who seek out optimal outcomes) tend to feel more regret than “satisficers” (people who are content with good-enough outcomes), unless they can take steps to lessen their maximizing tendencies.

How regret can guide our decisions

“Regret is a possible element of any decision that we make,” writes Leahy. “But the likelihood that you will regret your decisions will depend on how you think about making your decisions and how you cope with living with the result.”


If you’re someone who lets past regrets fester in your mind, Leahy recommends that you fight against irrational thinking and think more realistically about where you are in life. He suggests using approaches from cognitive-behavioral therapy to question your assumptions. Here are some of his tips.

Remember that you don’t know things would have turned out better. If you imagine your life would have been better “if only…,” keep in mind that your assumption is not based on real evidence. Instead of focusing on where you might have been, turn toward the future and remember it can change based on the choices you make now.

Focus on the positive aspects of your current life , to balance out the negative feelings that come with regret. Your negativity bias can keep you preoccupied with what’s wrong rather than what’s right. So, it’s a good idea to practice gratitude for the good in your life—even for the small, simple things.

Don’t forget that sometimes things don’t turn out the way you wanted them to , even with your most thoughtful planning. Life can hand you lemons, but that’s not necessarily your fault. You cannot be omniscient; so, you need to accept that sometimes you will regret your choices. But that doesn’t mean you should criticize yourself endlessly. Better to learn from your mistakes than to punish yourself.

Accept tradeoffs and compromises. Not everything has to turn out just the way you wanted it to. You will stymie your progress if you insist otherwise and make yourself miserable in the process. So, aim to be a satisficer rather than a maximizer.

Overall, Leahy advises that, once you’ve learned whatever lessons regret can teach you, you can let go of unrealistic expectations about what might have been, enjoy your life as it is, and start planning for a better future.

“Look around you at what is in the present moment and hold on to it with a warm embrace,” he writes. “Because your regrets will only keep you from what you have and who you are and trap you in a fictional world that never was—and never could have been.”

About the Author

Jill Suttie

Jill Suttie, Psy.D. , is Greater Good ’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good .

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How to Cope With Regret

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Daniel B. Block, MD, is an award-winning, board-certified psychiatrist who operates a private practice in Pennsylvania.

Ridvan_celik / Getty Images

What Is Regret?

Tips for coping with regret, what causes regret, what do people regret most, impact of regret.

Life is full of choices and paths not taken, so it isn’t surprising that people sometimes feel regret over both the decisions they made and the ones they didn’t.

Regret can be an incredibly painful emotion. While rooted in feelings of contrition, disappointment, guilt, or remorse for things that have happened in the past, such feelings can have a powerful influence over your life in the here and now. The problem is that when you are feeling regret over past choices or past mistakes, you might sometimes miss out on the joys of the present moment.

Learn more about the power of regret, what causes it, and what you can do to cope.

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Regret is defined as an aversive emotion focused on the belief that some event from the past could have been changed in order to produce a more desirable outcome.

It is a type of counterfactual thinking , which involves imagining the ways your life might have gone differently. Sometimes counterfactual thinking might mean appreciating your good luck at avoiding disaster, but at other times it focuses on being disappointed or regretful.

Characteristics of Regret

• It focuses on the past
• It is a negative, aversive emotion
• It focuses on aspects of the self
• It leads to upward comparisons 
• It often involves self-blame

The reason why regret feels so awful is because, by its nature, it implies that there is something you could have done, some choice you could have made, or some action you might have taken that would have made something good happen or avoided something terrible.

Regret isn't just wishing events had gone differently; it also involves an inherent aspect of self-blame and even guilt.  

Regret is a difficult thing to feel, but some experts suggest it can also have a positive impact if you cope with it well and allow it to help you make better choices going forward.

"No regrets" has become a popular mantra for many, signifying the idea that regret is a waste of time and energy. It's a worldview repeated in popular culture and touted by everyone from social media influencers to celebrities to self-help gurus.

And, according to psychologist Daniel Pink, author of "The Power of Regret," it is 100% wrong. He suggests that regret is not only perfectly normal, it can even be healthy. According to Pink, regret can act as a source of valuable information. When utilized well, it can guide, motivate, and inspire you to make better choices in the future.

While you can’t avoid regret, there are things that you can do to minimize these feelings. Or take the negativity out of these feelings and turn your regrets into opportunities for growth and change. 

Regret is most often characterized as a negative emotion , but it can serve an important function and even act as a positive force in your life at times. For example, regret can be motivating. It can drive you to overcome past mistakes or take action to correct them

Research has also found that both experienced regret and anticipated regret can influence the decisions that you make in the future. Efforts to avoid future regrets can help you make better decisions .

Practice Self-Acceptance

Acknowledging and accepting what you are feeling is essential. When you accept yourself and what you are feeling, you are able to recognize that your value isn't defined by your mistakes or failures.

Accepting yourself and your feelings does not mean you don't want to change things or do better. It just means that you are able to recognize that you are always learning, changing, and growing. 

Remind yourself that the events of the past don't determine your future, and you are capable of making better choices in the future.

Forgive Yourself

Because regret involves a component of guilt and self-recrimination, finding ways to forgive yourself can help relieve some of the negative feelings associated with regret. Forgiving yourself involves making a deliberate choice to let go of the anger, resentment, or disappointment you feel about yourself.

Accepting your mistakes is one part of this process, but forgiveness also requires you to practice self-compassion. Rather than punishing yourself for mistakes, treat yourself with the same kindness and forgiveness that you would show a loved one.

You can do this by taking responsibility for what happened, expressing remorse for your errors, and taking action to make amends. You might not be able to change the past, but taking steps to do better in the future can help you forgive yourself and move forward instead of looking back.

Apologize for Mistakes

In addition to forgiving yourself, you may find it helpful to apologize to other people who may have also been affected. This can be particularly important if your regrets are centered on conflicts in relationships or other problems that have caused emotional distress and pain.

A sincere apology can let the other person know that you feel remorse about what happened and that you empathize with their feelings.

Take Action

One way to help cope with feelings of regret is to use those experiences to fuel future action. Consider what you might have changed and done differently, but instead of ruminating over what cannot be changed, reframe it as a learning opportunity that will allow you to make better choices in the future. 

In reality, you may not have been capable of making a "better" choice in the past simply because you didn't have the knowledge, experience, or foresight to predict the outcome. You made the choice you did based on what you knew then and the tools and information you had at your disposal.

Remind yourself that now that because of what you learned in the past, you now have the knowledge you need to make a better choice the next time you encounter a similar dilemma.

Remember that the events of the past don't determine your future, and you are capable of making better choices in the future.

Cognitive reframing is a strategy that can help you change your mindset and shift how you think about a situation. This approach can help you change your perspective, show compassion for yourself, and validate the emotions that you are feeling. It can also help you to see situations in a more positive way and overcome some of the cognitive distortions that often play a role in negative thinking .

As Pink notes in his book, the popular “no regrets’ philosophy isn’t so much about denying regret as it is about reframing it, or as he calls it, optimizing it. It is an acknowledgment that mistakes of the past have shaped who you are today. 

It is about reframing that regret and seeing it as a learning opportunity that helps build resilience and wisdom. It’s not that you wouldn’t change past decisions if you could–it’s about recognizing that those choices helped you learn and can help you make better decisions in the future.

Changing how you think about things that have happened in the past can also help you see regret in a different way. Instead of dwelling on negative feelings, you can see it as information that can guide you going forward.

Anytime you are required to make a choice, there is an opportunity for regret. Did you make the right decision? Could things have turned out better? Would you be happier if you’d chosen differently? 

Such regrets sometimes center on the mundane (like whether you should have had the soup or the sandwich for lunch) to the life-altering (like whether you should have picked a different career or married a different partner). 

But what exactly causes people to regret some decisions and not others? According to researchers, opportunity itself plays a major role.

If the decision was out of your hands or largely influenced by outside forces, you're less likely to feel regretful about what happened. The reason for this is that processes such as cognitive dissonance and rationalization kick in to unconsciously minimize your personal responsibility for the outcome. 

For example, if you buy an item knowing you cannot return it, you're less likely to regret your purchase. According to researchers, people often unconsciously suppress or distort many of life's daily regrets without even realizing that it is happening. 

It is when you have more opportunities to change your mind, such as when you know you can return an item and pick something different, that you are more likely to wish you had chosen differently. Researchers refer to this as the opportunity principle, which suggests that more opportunity leads to more regrets.

Control and opportunity can play a role in whether or not you experience regret. When your ability to control the outcome is out of your hands, you may be less likely to regret your choice. But when many different options are present, you're more likely to regret your choice.

In an older study published in 2008, researchers analyzed archival data to learn more about which areas were most likely to trigger feelings of regret. The results indicated that the six most common regrets were centered in the areas of education, career, romance, parenting, the self, and leisure. Beyond those top six, regrets then centered on the topics of finance, family, health, friends, spirituality, and community.

Interestingly, people are often more likely to regret inaction than action. For example, you're more likely to regret not choosing a certain career or not asking out someone you were interested in than to feel regret over the job and partner you did choose. This is because actions not taken are more subject to imagined outcomes. 

The consequences of the actions you did take are set in stone and readily apparent, but the ones you didn't take seem like boundless opportunities wasted. In other words, the perceived gains of the choices you didn’t make seem to outweigh the actual consequences of your actions, so the sting of regret for missed opportunities looms much larger in your mind.

Common regrets center on areas of life including education, career, and romance. In addition to regretting choices, people often regret not taking certain actions in the past.

Regret can take both a physical and emotional toll on your body and mind. Feelings of regret can often lead to physical symptoms such as muscle tension, sleep disturbances, changes in appetite, headaches, muscle pain, joint pain, and chronic stress . 

Studies have shown that persistent regret can increase your risk of problems with breathing issues, chest pain, joint pain, and poorer overall health.

Constantly ruminating on past regret can lead to symptoms such as anxiety, depression, poor self-esteem , helplessness , and feelings of hopelessness . 

Fear of future regret can also affect your behavior. Anticipated regret, or the belief that you will regret something in the future, can also play a role in risk-taking and health-related behaviors you engage in today.

When people think taking an action will lead to greater regret, they are less likely to engage in risky behavior. And when people think that not taking action will lead to feelings of regret (such as not taking care of their health or not engaging in regular exercise), they become more likely to take steps to avoid those anticipated regrets.

Studies have also found that concern about anticipated regret can influence the decisions that people make on the behalf of others. When people are worried that people are going to be disappointed or regretful, they are more likely to make more conservative choices.

Coping poorly with regret can lead to stress and emotional pain. It can also affect your future behavior. Anticipated regret often leads people to avoid risky behavior or engage in certain actions in order to avoid consequences that they might eventually regret.

Regret is an aversive emotion that can be difficult to overcome. "Accept life, and you must accept regret," said the philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel. While regret is an unavoidable consequence of living life and making choices, you can find ways to cope with these feelings and even turn them into opportunities for growth.

Learning to accept your feelings, forgiving yourself for mistakes, and taking steps to learn from your experiences can help minimize many of the negative feelings associated with regret. While you may not truly be able to live life with "no regrets," you can change how you think about the things you might have changed and learn to focus on the present moment instead of ruminating over the past.

Roese NJ, Summerville A. What we regret most... and why . Pers Soc Psychol Bull . 2005;31(9):1273-1285. doi:10.1177/0146167205274693

Pink D. The Power of Regret .

Joseph-Williams N, Edwards A, Elwyn G. The importance and complexity of regret in the measurement of 'good' decisions: a systematic review and a content analysis of existing assessment instruments . Health Expect . 2011;14(1):59-83. doi:10.1111/j.1369-7625.2010.00621.x

Cornish MA, Wade NG. A therapeutic model of self-forgiveness with intervention strategies for counselors . Journal of Counseling & Development . 2015;93(1):96-104. doi:10.1002/j.1556-6676.2015.00185.x

Papé L, Martinez LF. Past and future regret and missed opportunities: an experimental approach on separate evaluation and different time frames .  Psicol Reflex Crit . 2017;30(1):20. doi:10.1186/s41155-017-0074-8

Gilovich T, Medvec VH, Chen S. Commission, omission, and dissonance reduction: Coping with the “Monty Hall” problem . Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 1995;21:182–190. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00353

Wrosch C, Bauer I, Miller GE, Lupien S. Regret intensity, diurnal cortisol secretion, and physical health in older individuals: Evidence for directional effects and protective factors . Psychology and Aging . 2007;22(2):319-330. doi:10.1037/0882-7974.22.2.319

Brewer NT, DeFrank JT, Gilkey MB. Anticipated regret and health behavior: A meta-analysis . Health Psychol . 2016;35(11):1264-1275. doi:10.1037/hea0000294

Kumano S, Hamilton A, Bahrami B. The role of anticipated regret in choosing for others . Sci Rep . 2021;11(1):12557. doi:10.1038/s41598-021-91635-z

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Personal Narrative Essay about Regrets

Regret is the emotion of wishing one had made a different decision because the     consequence of the decision was unfavorable. I've felt the emotion of regret many times have you?    

Regret is a normal and common emotion everyone has when making decisions. No matter whether you sit back and think before making a decision or just jump to it, there's still an equal chance of you regretting your decision later. 

Nobody's perfect, everyone has once made a decision that made them feel a sort of shame, dissatisfaction, disappointment , and even maybe remorse because of past episodes. A past episode that constantly replays in my head and makes me so ashamed and disappointed in myself is the time in middle school me and my best friend were finally accepted in the big friend group with our other school mates . We were so excited it was like our middle school experience was finally going to happen. At times me and my best friend would see how the friend group would constantly mistreat others but we didn't speak up we just let it be but at one point there was no one really left for the friend group to mistreat so they started to turn on my bestfriend and it hurt to see them mistreat the girl that has been my side since day one and I've always had her back but this time it was different because I was so worried about me being bullied next So when my best friend had to suffer alone, I stood quietly.

Although my bestfriend and I are still friends and she always tells me it was fine that I didn't defend her and she says she forgives me every time I apologize for it, that doesn't change the fact that it happened. Looking back at it now there are so many things I could have done to help her. One thing that i shouldve have done was be less selfless. I was too worried about myself being mistreated by the friend group. I turned my back when my friend needed me the most. If I would have just defended her yes i would have gotten mistreated too but at least she wouldn't have been alone. 

I've definitely grown a lot since then and it's now more rare if I'm sitting back while something wrong is happening right in front of me. From that episode I definitely learned to speak up for what's right instead of agreeing with the bad things others were doing. Just the way I turned my back on my best friend just for others validation and so that I wouldn't get mistreated too just makes me feel such shame now. I will never not forget this and I know she won't either but that's the way it is. Some regrets can be forgotten if they're simple and even if they're not simple it's fine because no matter what you do differently next time there's still a chance of you regretting it.

Yes, even though regret is an emotion that doesn't always feel too good and at times makes you feel disappointed in yourself at the end of the time regret helps us learn and it makes us realize we need to think carefully when making decisions and it helps us grow and learn from our mistakes.

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clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

How to deal with regret and forgive yourself for making imperfect decisions

During the past year, we have had to make consequential decisions, often based on insufficient information and amid unparalleled uncertainty. These conditions are ripe for generating one of the most common emotions that I see in my psychology practice: regret.

Many of my patients struggle with the results of pandemic-related decisions. Some regret decisions they made about the care of their aging relatives. Others are haunted by the knowledge that they inadvertently transmitted covid-19 to people they love. Parents who decided to keep their kids at home now feel guilty because their children struggle with mental health issues.

Barbara Roberts, clinical psychologist and director of wellness and clinical services for the Washington Football Team, said her clients expressed regrets during the pandemic about being “stuck in a bad relationship, or that they hadn’t taken a trip or done something important to them when they had a chance.”

Christine Le, a 27-year-old from San Francisco, is kicking herself for not getting enough done during the past 15 months. “What I regret the most during the pandemic is that I didn’t focus more on self-development with the extra amount of time that I had,” she said. “I should have put more time into writing my blog, self-care and strengthening my relationships with others.”

A study from Turkey , which is yet to be peer reviewed, suggests that regret is a common issue tied to the pandemic. But it is an emotion that can lead people to spiral into a pernicious mix of shame, anger and depression, unless they take steps to prevent that. 

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Of course, regret was a pervasive emotion long before the pandemic. In one study, it was found to be the second-most frequently mentioned emotion in everyday conversation (after love). Romantic regrets tend to be most common, and those centered on social relationships in general are felt more strongly than nonsocial ones — lending credence to the saying that nobody on their deathbed wishes they had spent more time working. 

Studies have found that a high level of regret is related to depression , anxiety and worse sleep and problem-solving. Most people feel a pang of regretted action (I wish I hadn’t done that!) quickly and intensely, but regret over inaction (I should have done that) lingers longer . When looking back on life, we tend to most regret not taking chances and opportunities that could have brought us closer to being the person we want to be.

If you tend to get stuck on the things you could have done better in the past, here are strategies to help shift your focus to a better future.  

Accept reality and your emotions

 Regret is uncomfortable, so we often try to mentally run away from it. But denial, distraction or suppression do not work for long — and the pain returns with a vengeance. For example, drinking heavily each evening to drown out your guilt about going on a pandemic vacation that led to your family contracting the coronavirus will amplify the regret in the long run.

 First, try to acknowledge the full reality of what is regretted, including your role in it. As you open up to regret, you might notice different emotions coming to the surface.

“Try to identify and name what you are feeling — name it to tame it,” suggested Chris Germer, clinical psychologist and co-author of “ The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion: Freeing Yourself from Destructive Thoughts and Emotions .” “Notice the body sensations associated with guilt, remorse, anger, sadness, shame, and see if you can make space for them.”

Tell us about the hardest parts of life after social distancing

To increase your emotion vocabulary, try using an emotion wheel . Observe the feelings nonjudgmentally, with curiosity, letting them ebb and flow — this is an essence of mindfulness.

You also can observe any judgments your mind is making about these feelings and sensations. Allowing both emotions and thoughts to be there, without fighting them or buying into them, teaches you that you can tolerate the pain without identifying with it.  Strength can be cultivated through vulnerability.

Practice self-compassion

 A prominent feature of regret, especially the kind that sticks around, is rumination about all the different ways you could have made a better decision or action. This obsessing can turn guilt (an emotion that stems from believing you did something wrong) into shame (the belief that you are wrong or defective). 

 Although guilt can motivate rectifying action, shame invites wallowing in self-reproach and self-criticism. “Unfortunately, many believe that punishing yourself will lead to positive change. But nothing can be further from the truth,” said Germer.

Research shows that self-compassion is related to the pursuit of important goals, lower procrastination and less fear of failure.

“Self-blame shuts down learning centers in the brain,” said Tara Brach, a Washington-area meditation teacher, clinical psychologist and author of “ Radical Acceptance .” It hardens your heart and isolates you. It doesn’t make what happened okay, nor does it improve your future.”

Instead, remember that to be human is to make mistakes. “Actively offer yourself forgiveness by, for example, whispering ‘forgiven’ or putting a hand on your heart. If that seems like a tall order, having an intention to forgive can be a start,” said Brach.

In addition to engaging in whatever self-care routine works for you (exercise, meditation, spending time outdoors), other suggestions for fostering self-compassion include embracing yourself, asking yourself what you would say to a friend in a similar situation, or trying to channel the emotions of someone who deeply cares about you. You could also reach out to loving people in real life; studies found that sharing regret with others can bring you closer to people .

 Make amends when possible

Accepting reality, and yourself, allows you to face your responsibility and take corrective action. “After you acknowledge what happened, own it, do what needs doing, and seek forgiveness if possible,” said Marine Corps Maj. Thomas Schueman, who teaches courses focused on moral injury, homecoming and belonging at the U.S. Naval Academy, and who led troops in two deployments, losing some of them in action.

Niche Brislane, 32, a farmer from Max, Neb., said she has worked to minimize the damage that resulted from bad choices she made as a young woman. “I made bad financial, relationship, and education decisions, and failed to listen to well-meaning people who had more life experience than me,” she said. “I have salvaged what could be salvaged, and I’m now in a better place.”

Even if you cannot do anything concrete to repair the situation, you can focus on behaving with integrity going forward. “If you’re solely focused on past regrets, you are unable to be a loving and caring person now and contribute to the society the way we’d like,” said Russ Harris, therapist and author of “ The Reality Slap ” from Melbourne, Australia.

 Expand your thinking

The pandemic brought extreme uncertainty, danger and the disruption of routines. “When you are scared, your thinking and decision-making are affected. You become more reactive and less deliberate,” said Brach. “And we have all been in a constant state of fear for more than a year.”

 It is thus not surprising that your decision-making was not at its best, so give yourself a break. “Realize that what happened was a result of many factors and conditions,” said Germer. “And you did the best that you could in that moment, with the information available to you.”  

 Challenge the unhelpful thinking patterns that can magnify regret. Some of the common patterns tackled in cognitive therapy include:

● All-or-nothing thinking: “If I couldn’t protect my kids from getting depressed, I am a bad parent.”

● Catastrophizing: “This mistake has doomed me forever!”

● Minimizing the positives: “I forgot my friend’s birthday,” while disregarding all the ways you’ve shown her care and kindness over the years.

● Fortunetelling: “I should have known better,” even when it was impossible to predict what was coming.

Learn from your regrets

Regret provides us with unprecedented opportunities for learning and improving. Roberts recommends always asking yourself, “What can I learn from this experience?” and “How can I do better next time?”

Harris suggests that regret can reveal what matters to you most and what kind of person you want to be. For example, you wouldn’t feel bad about not finishing your part of a project on time if you didn’t care about your teammates and take pride in your work. “When you are not consumed by fighting regret or by self-critical judgments and rumination, you can learn a lot about yourself,” Harris said.

 “Productive regret is a teacher,” said Brach. “You learn how to turn failures into feedback that helps you improve your decisions and behaviors in the future. You learn to make good decisions by making bad ones.” Research indicates that exploring regrets is related to the search for meaning in life and psychological growth .

 “Real tragedy is when you don’t find meaning in your mistakes,” Schueman said. “When you find gratitude for what you learned, growth happens.”

Do you have questions about home improvement or homeownership?

Jelena Kecmanovic is the founding director of the Arlington/DC Behavior Therapy Institute and an adjunct professor of psychology at Georgetown University. Find her @DrKpsychologist. 

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How to Stop Regretting Your Decisions

Last Updated: September 21, 2022 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Trudi Griffin, LPC, MS . Trudi Griffin is a Licensed Professional Counselor in Wisconsin specializing in Addictions and Mental Health. She provides therapy to people who struggle with addictions, mental health, and trauma in community health settings and private practice. She received her MS in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Marquette University in 2011. There are 12 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 257,188 times.

Regret is something we all experience from time to time. While regret has some benefits to your personal growth and development, ruminating too long on the past can have negative impacts on your physical and emotional health. There are a variety of steps you can take, from altering your mindset to changing your lifestyle, that help you cope with regret and ultimately leave it behind.

Altering Your Mindset

• Regret is negative feelings of guilt, sadness, or anger over past decisions. Everyone experiences regret at some point in life, especially young people, but regret becomes a problem when ruminating over past mistakes results in disengagement with your life, career, and personal relationships. [1] X Research source
• Counterfactual thinking drives regret. This means that the easier it is to imagine a different, better outcome for a situation, the more likely we are to regret that decision. Regret is most intense when you feel you've come close to a major success and missed the opportunity because of poor planning or inaction. If, for example, you play the same numbers in the lottery each year and, the one year you don't play, your numbers come up. [2] X Research source
• Regret can have negative emotional and physical effects. Regret can lead to mental health issues such as depression and anxiety and the chronic stress associated with regret leads to hormonal imbalances and a weakened immune system. [3] X Research source
• Regret is distributed differently across genders. Women are more likely to disengage from past relationships and tend to experience more overall regret over past romantic experiences. [4] X Research source

• When you find yourself riddled with regret, and ruminating over what you could have done differently, remove yourself from the situation. Ask yourself, "If a friend or family member was telling me this, what would I say? Would I think taking on this level of blame is reasonable?"
• Consider the circumstances surrounding the situation or decision you're regretting. A variety of factors beyond your control could have influenced your judgment. Were you under to pressure to make a choice prematurely? Did you have limited knowledge at the time you made a decision? Were there multiple stressors impairing your judgment?
• Say you're in charge of managing a charity organization. For an upcoming fundraiser, you've secured a popular hotel bar/restaurant well in advance. The hotel manager calls you a week before the event to alert you he inadvertently overbooked that weekend. As your group was the second to make reservations, he is honoring the first group's request over yours. Panicked, you scramble to find alternative options. You find another hotel bar/restaurant a mile down the road and a local theater with no bookings that weekend. Lacking time to weigh pros and cons as much as you would like, you settle on the second hotel. When the event comes, the hotel staff is rude, the food is poorly prepared, and the space is not big enough to adequately seat the attendees. In this scenario, you might regret your decision to choose the hotel and wish you had gone with the theater. However, how much control did you really have? You were put, by circumstance, in a difficult situation and had to make a decision fast. While it did not go over well, it's probably not reasonable to blame yourself.

• All our actions have a ripple effect. That is, there is an influence to our choices that we cannot calculate. Usually, the impact of our choices is only truly visible years after decisions are made. Even if something looks bad now, we do not know what the future holds and the regretted decision could turn out to be only minor setback years later.
• Keep in mind, when you engage in "what-ifs" you're usually operating under the assumption the imagined scenario would be superior to your current state. The fact is, this is not something you can know. Try to imagine a "what-if" scenario that acknowledges the possibility the choice you made was actually the better one. Take the above lottery example. What if you had played your numbers that week and did win big? What if you quit your job, grew bored, and so the fortune ultimately resulted in you developing a problem with gambling, drinking, or hard narcotics to pass the time?

Being Proactive

• Regret is how we learn to reexamine our actions. Personal growth and positive change would be impossible without something forcing us to periodically identify decisions that lead to negative consequences. Addicts, for example, often rely on regret as motivation to get clean. [7] X Research source
• Reframe your thoughts on the regretful situation or decision. Think of mistakes as opportunities to grow and change. Young people tend to cope better with regret, and much of that is attributed to the fact they view the emotion as a positive. They embrace the fact that regret is key to change and growth. [8] X Research source
• Accept blame. Oftentimes, people blame external circumstances for their actions. This leads to more bad decisions and, in turn, more regret. For example, say you were late to work because you stayed out late drinking. You might blame a stressful week or peer pressure for your actions and next time happy hour comes around you'll end up repeating the process. If instead, you think, "Staying out late was a bad decision and I faced consequences," you're more likely to avoid such actions in the future. You've embraced the fact you have control over the situation rather than diverting control to external forces. [9] X Research source

• Sadness is much like regret; it's a negative emotion but one that's beneficial to us as a species. Sad feelings push the mind into a hyper focused mode, which allows you to evaluate problems and figure out how to come to terms with life's difficulties.
• It's normal to respond to negative circumstances with sadness. Avoiding those feelings can prolong the duration of your regret and frustration. After a particularly harsh failure, give yourself a week to grieve your loss and experience your disappointment.

• If you're having a difficult time, leading to feelings of sadness and regret, are your friends coming through for you? Who is offering you their support and love and who is fading to the background? [11] X Research source
• Identify those people who do not support you emotionally and who have, in the past, ensnared you in difficult situations. Continuing to foster negative interpersonal relationship longterm is something you will come to regret. Cut ties with those who do not support you and get closer to those who do. [12] X Research source

• Was anyone hurt by a decision you made? Did the consequences of your actions have an affect on family members or friends? There might be phone calls you need to make or letters you need to write. If necessary, take time to apologize.
• Write down all the emotions you're experiencing. "I'm sad because X, Y, and Z." "I'm angry because X, Y, and Z." Look back over your list when you finish and evaluate what lead to your present mindset. What could you have done differently? What is driving these emotions and how could you reasonably eliminate them?

Changing Your Lifestyle

• Being mindful means observing your thoughts from a distance. You're able to objectively evaluate your past and your mistakes, which allows you to be reasonable about the true impact your regrets have on your life. [14] X Research source
• Basic meditation can help with mindfulness. Focus on your breathing or a particular word or phrase. Allow thoughts to enter your brain and withhold judgment as you experience them. [15] X Trustworthy Source HelpGuide Nonprofit organization dedicated to providing free, evidence-based mental health and wellness resources. Go to source
• Pay attention to any sensations in your body, such as itching and breathing. Take note of all senses, such as sight, smell, sound, smell, and taste. Try to experience each moment fully aware of your surroundings and feelings. [16] X Trustworthy Source HelpGuide Nonprofit organization dedicated to providing free, evidence-based mental health and wellness resources. Go to source
• Experience emotion without judgment. Allow yourself to experience sadness, fear, anger, and pain without trying to eliminate or repress the emotions. [17] X Trustworthy Source HelpGuide Nonprofit organization dedicated to providing free, evidence-based mental health and wellness resources. Go to source
• If successful, mindfulness keeps you focused on the present moment. This keeps you from succumbing to thoughts of the past and past decisions. Focusing on what you can control, that is the present, can reduce self judgment over former decisions or moments. Mindfulness therapy has been particularly helpful in elderly patients who have chronic regret over their lives. [18] X Research source

• Tie your longterm goals to abstract achievements. Say, "In five years, I want to feel happy most of the time" rather than "In five years, I want to be at the top of my career." This way, you're sense of achievement is tied to your mindset, which you can control, rather than aspects of life that are often beyond your control.
• Research shows that concrete rewards actually make people less happy than abstract ones. People who are motivated by money, fame, fortune, and career success are less happy overall than people who strive for abstracts like happiness, positive relationships, and intellectual pursuits.

• Discuss your disappointment with a friend or family member. Letting it fester can allow that to grow worse with time. Select people who've had similar experiences and can offer their insight. [19] X Research source
• If you're struggling to overcome feelings of disappointment, consider therapy. A therapist can offer an objective third person perspective into your situation and offer you advice on how to cope with negative thoughts.

• Regret is often the result of a thinking imbalance. Holding on to a particular decision, or a set of decisions, distorts are ability to realistically evaluate our lives as undue focus is placed on negatives.
• Write down all the positives in your life, such as family, friends, jobs, and any successes you've had so far. In reality, each situation has benefits and drawbacks. The trouble is, when we regret we only see the drawbacks. Embracing the benefits of the present is a great way to minimize feelings of regret.

Expert Q&A

You might also like.

• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-mindful-self-express/201205/the-psychology-regret
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-practice/201810/7-signs-youre-too-hard-yourself
• ↑ https://www.coloradotech.edu/blog/2018/september/how-to-learn-from-your-mistakes
• ↑ https://sites.uci.edu/chpleaders/2011/04/14/how-to-accept-blame-when-you-deserve-it/
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-other-side-relationships/202208/dont-miss-the-point-disappointment
• ↑ https://au.reachout.com/articles/what-makes-a-good-friend
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-flux/201407/10-relationship-red-flags
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-mindful-self-express/201206/the-neuroscience-regret
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/mindfulness
• ↑ http://www.helpguide.org/harvard/benefits-of-mindfulness.htm
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-couch/201206/coping-disappointment
• ↑ https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_regrets_can_help_you_make_better_decisions

About This Article

Medical Disclaimer

The content of this article is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, examination, diagnosis, or treatment. You should always contact your doctor or other qualified healthcare professional before starting, changing, or stopping any kind of health treatment.

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Regretting your decisions can hold you back in life, but by learning from your mistakes, you can grow as a person. Instead of focusing on the things you regret, look for opportunities to learn and improve yourself. For example, if you failed a class, take it as a lesson that you need to work harder in the future or change the way you study. On the other hand, it’s natural to feel negative emotions when you make a bad decision. It’s part of how we learn. If you feel overwhelmed, try practicing mindfulness meditation. Just focus on your breathing and let your thoughts and feelings come and go on their own. For more tips from our co-author, including how to set goals for the future to help cope with regret, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Regret and other emotions related to decision-making: antecedents, appraisals, and phenomenological aspects.

• Department of Psychology, University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Caserta, Italy

Objectives: The mainstream position on regret in psychological literature is that its necessary conditions are agency and responsibility, that is, to choose freely but badly. Without free choice, other emotions, such as disappointment, are deemed to be elicited when the outcome is worse than expected. In two experiments, we tested the opposite hypothesis that being forced by external circumstances to choose an option inconsistent with one’s own intentions is an important source of regret and a core component of its phenomenology, regardless of the positivity/negativity of the post-decision outcome. Along with regret, four post-decision emotions – anger toward oneself, disappointment, anger toward circumstances, and satisfaction – were investigated to examine their analogies and differences to regret with regard to antecedents, appraisals, and phenomenological aspects.

Methods: Through the scenario methodology, we manipulated three variables: choice (free/forced), outcome (positive/negative), and time (short/long time after decision-making). Moreover, we investigated whether responsibility, decision justifiability, and some phenomenological aspects (self-attribution, other attribution, and contentment) mediated the effect exerted by choice, singularly or in interaction with outcome and time, on the five emotions. Each study was conducted with 336 participants, aged 18–60.

Results: The results of both studies were similar and supported our hypothesis. In particular, regret elicited by forced choice was always high, regardless of the valence of outcome, whereas free choice elicited regret was high only with a negative outcome. Moreover, regret was unaffected by responsibility and decision justifiability, whereas it was affected by the three phenomenological dimensions.

Conclusion: Our results suggest that (1) the prevailing theory of regret is too binding, since it posits as necessary some requirements which are not; (2) the antecedents and phenomenology of regret are broader than it is generally believed; (3) decision-making produces a complex emotional constellation, where the different emotions, singularly and/or in combination, constitute the affective responses to the different aspects of decision-making.

Introduction

The well-established psychological concept of regret based on decision theories strongly links the genesis of this emotion to the factual or counterfactual comparison between the actual outcome resulting from the option chosen in decision-making and the better outcome deriving from the foregone option ( Bell, 1982 ; Loomes and Sugden, 1982 ; Tsiros, 1998 ; Roese and Summerville, 2005 ; van Dijk and Zeelenberg, 2005 ; Zeelenberg and Pieters, 2007 ; Beike et al., 2009 ). The corollary of this conception is the assumption that decision-makers choose freely and, thus, they have control over their actions and responsibility for their choices. Self-blaming for a bad outcome deriving from a wrong decision and the desire to undo this decision are considered as specific characteristics of the phenomenology 1 of regret and as a discriminant criterion for distinguishing regret from other decision-related emotions, such as disappointment ( Inman et al., 1997 ; Zeelenberg et al., 1998a , b ; Gilbert et al., 2004 ).

It is worth noting that research on regret has come to a standstill in the last years, maybe because the wide consensus on the theory described above has led to the idea that the knowledge of this emotion does not need to be further developed. However, in this paper, we aimed to point out that the prevailing theory has not considered that an important source of regret is represented by forced choices, that is, by choices due to the constraint of external circumstances (e.g., physical accidents, indigence, family pressures, and deaths) that compel people to choose an option inconsistent with their intentions. A corollary of this assumption is that forced choices can produce regret even when their outcome is positive. Moreover, we aimed to show that the phenomenology of the regret elicited by forced choices is characterized by the awareness of having made an unsatisfactory but unavoidable choice. Finally, we aimed to reconsider analogies and differences between regret and other post-decision emotions.

In the following sections, the state of the art of the literature on regret and other decision-related emotions is reviewed, with particular reference to the aspects that have been investigated in our studies.

Theoretical Background

A widely accepted definition posits that regret “is a comparison-based emotion of self-blame, experienced when people realize or imagine that their present situation would have been better had they decided differently in the past” ( Zeelenberg and Pieters, 2007 , p. 7). This conception originates from the regret theory built by rational decision theorists in Economics ( Bell, 1982 ; Loomes and Sugden, 1982 ). According to this theory, decision-makers evaluate the outcome of the chosen alternative by comparing it with the outcome of the nonchosen alternative(s): Regret and rejoicing are the terms used to define the result of the unfavorable and favorable comparison, respectively. People tend to avoid choices that could generate regret.

Psychological research has expanded the economic conception of regret by highlighting that the comparison can occur not only at the factual but also at the counterfactual level, by imagining the possible outcomes of the foregone options ( Kahneman and Miller, 1986 ; Kahneman, 1995 ; Roese, 1999 ; van Dijk and Zeelenberg, 2005 ). Moreover, such a research has also investigated structural features of the regrettable decisions (e.g., deciding of acting vs. not acting; time effect on action-based regret and inaction-based regret, see below), appraisals ( van Dijk and Zeelenberg, 2002 ), phenomenology (e.g., Zeelenberg et al., 1998a ; Marcatto and Ferrante, 2008 ; Summerville and Buchanan, 2014 ; Buchanan et al., 2016 ), behavioral consequences (of both anticipated and experienced regret; e.g., Mellers, 2000 ; Tsiros and Mittal, 2000 ; Zeelenberg et al., 2001 ; Marcatto et al., 2015 ; Davidai and Gilovich, 2018 ), and modes of regulation of regret (e.g., Inman, 2007 ; Zeelenberg and Pieters, 2007 ; Seta et al., 2008 ).

For example, many studies have been devoted to establish whether actions are more intensely regretted than inactions (see for a review, Feldman et al., 2020 ). The debate stemming from the different positions has highlighted relevant phenomena, such as the temporal pattern of regret ( Gilovich and Medvec, 1994 , 1995 ; Gilovich et al., 1998 ), according to which actions are more regretted in the short term, whereas inactions are more regretted in the long term. Another phenomenon is the importance of the context in which decisions are made, which makes sometimes actions and sometimes inactions more regrettable ( Seta et al., 2001 ; Zeelenberg et al., 2002 ; Beike et al., 2009 ; Morrison and Roese, 2011 ; Seta and Seta, 2013 ; Feldman, 2020 ).

The pivotal points of the conception of regret shared by the above-mentioned studies are personal agency and responsibility, which are considered as structural features and central appraisals of regret. Consequently, the major components of its phenomenology are held to be self-blame for a bad decision and the desire to undo this decision. Similarly, since regret is assumed to derive from controllable events, its behavioral function is thought to be to modify the negative outcomes of the decision, when possible, or the type of choice in the future. These features are considered as a discriminant criterion for distinguishing regret from other negative emotions linked to decision-making, such as disappointment.

Indeed, the disappointment theory formulated by decision theorists ( Bell, 1985 ; Loomes and Sugden, 1986 ) postulates that disappointment originates from an outcome that is worse than expected and that would have been better in a different state of the world. Consequently, the point of reference of regret is the nonchosen option; the point of reference of disappointment is the expected but unrealized outcome within the same chosen option.

A consistent body of research has tried to substantiate this distinction psychologically by showing that regret and disappointment have different patterns of appraisal, counterfactual thoughts, phenomenology, and behavioral consequences (see for reviews, Zeelenberg et al., 1998a , 2000a ; van Dijk and Zeelenberg, 2002 ; George and Dane, 2016 ).

Although psychological research acknowledges that other emotions, besides regret and disappointment, can originate from decision-making (e.g., anger, sadness, satisfaction, and happiness), regret is considered unique for its relation with choice and responsibility (e.g., Roese and Summerville, 2005 ; Zeelenberg and Pieters, 2007 ; Buchanan et al., 2016 ; Davidai and Gilovich, 2018 ).

Compared to the position that ties regret to free choice and responsibility, the position that does not consider these requirements as essential, which we adopted in our research, is definitely not dominant. In addition to philosophers, such as Rorty (1980) , Solomon (1983) , and Taylor (1985) , according to which regret can also stem from events beyond personal control or from choices for which no alternatives are available, in psychology, this position has been advanced by Landman. She states that it “is appropriate to speak of regret both with reference to one’s own free and voluntary acts (or omissions) and also with reference to acts over which one had no personal control” ( Landman, 1987 , p. 151). Subsequently, she defines regret as a cognitive and emotional negative state, which can be generated by a wide class of antecedents ranging from misfortunes to mistakes and from voluntary actions and omissions to uncontrollable and accidental events ( Landman, 1993 , p. 27).

Connolly and colleagues have supported this position through some scenario-based experiments ( Connolly et al., 1997 ; Ordóñez and Connolly, 2000 ) where they manipulated the agent of decision-making (self vs. computer) and the outcome (better than, worse than, similar as the status quo ). On the whole, their findings show that responsibility can amplify regret but is not a necessary condition for its genesis and its experience, since regret can also be elicited by external decision-makers, such as a computer. Regret, as well as disappointment, increases especially when the outcome is worse than the status quo . Moreover, Connolly and Reb (2005) and Connolly and Butler (2006) criticized the economic conceptions of regret and disappointment as being inadequate to account for genuinely felt emotions resulting from decisions. They state that experienced emotions of regret and disappointment are similar to a greater extent than rational decision theorists assumed and that emotional reactions to choice outcomes are better understood in term of negative (regret, disappointment, and sadness) vs. positive (rejoicing, elation, and happiness) emotion clusters.

An attempt to conciliate the divergent positions about the role of agency and responsibility in the genesis and experience of regret has been the decision justification theory (DJT, Connolly and Zeelenberg, 2002 ). According to DJT, regret stems from two types of antecedents and related appraisals, which are not necessarily co-present: a comparatively bad outcome and a bad decision-making. Consequently, the theory posits that the feeling of self-blame, which seems to be unique to the regret phenomenology, compared to other decision-making-related emotions, is associated with the awareness of having decided badly ( Pieters and Zeelenberg, 2005 ), that is, in a rash or unjustified way. On the contrary, regret decreases or vanishes in virtue of the awareness that the decision process has been careful and accurate though its outcome has been negative, as some studies have demonstrated ( Inman and Zeelenberg, 2002 ; Kwong et al., 2013 ; Towers et al., 2016 ; Verbruggen and De Vos, 2020 ).

However, an experimental study of Matarazzo and Abbamonte (2008) failed to find that the justifiability of the choice diminished the intensity of regret. Instead, this study revealed that being forced by external circumstances to choose an option different from the one desired generates more intense regret than the one produced by a free choice.

Interestingly, some studies on real life or career regrets have questioned the relationship between the intensity of regret and the controllability of the eliciting events. For example, Wilkinson et al. (2015) found that while the level of regret for controllable events varied as a function of individual self-esteem, the one for uncontrollable events was always high. In the career domain, Wrzesniewski et al. (2006) , Berg et al. (2010) , and Newton et al. (2012) found more intense regrets among those who had not chosen their current occupation, due to social or family constraints, than among those who had chosen it.

In summary, although some studies have challenged the idea that free choice and responsibility are a necessary condition for the onset of regret, to the best of our knowledge, there are no experimental studies that have systematically investigated the hypothesis that forced choice is an important source of regret and a core component of its phenomenology, regardless of the valence of the post-decision outcome. The studies presented here address this issue. As we will specify in the following section, we use the oxymoron “forced choices” to designate the choices for which no alternatives are available. In these types of choices, the decision-maker is not an external agent, as in the studies conducted by Connolly and colleagues ( Connolly et al., 1997 ; Ordóñez and Connolly, 2000 ), but the individual herself. Nevertheless, decision-making is not free because, due to external or internal impediments or constraints, she cannot or feels she cannot choose the desired option.

Regret and Free vs. Forced Choice: The Rationale of the Studies

The idea behind the present studies is that decision-making does not imply as a necessary condition that individuals decide freely. Indeed, people can be forced by external circumstances to choose an option that is inconsistent with one’s own intentions. In our opinion, this would elicit regret per se , independently of the outcome and the justifiability of decision-making, since the forced choice implies giving up the initial and preferred option. This effect should be particularly robust in self-relevant domains, due to the subjective importance of the preferred but not-chosen option. The “chosen” option, as a substitute for the former, would be inherently less attractive even if a positive outcome were derived from it. Moreover, in accordance with the “Zeigarnik effect” (1927–1935) , the option that had to be given up and was not carried out tends to remain in the mind because of the psychological state of tension it generated, which was not resolved by the behavior. As Savitsky et al. (1997) pointed out, the persistence of unaccomplished tasks is likely to elicit regret. Free choice, on the contrary, should elicit regret only when decision-making results in a negative outcome. Consequently, regret stemming from forced choice should be more intense than the one derived from free choice because in the latter case it is moderated by the outcome, whereas in the former the outcome is deemed irrelevant.

More specifically, the main hypothesis that was tested in our studies is the following: A forced choice should elicit the same high intensity of regret both in case of positive and negative outcome, whereas a free choice should produce more intense regret with a negative than a positive outcome.

A corollary of this hypothesis concerns the characteristics of the phenomenology of regret: In the case of free choice, it should be marked by self-blame and the sense of personal responsibility; whereas when the choice was forced, it should be characterized by the awareness of having made an unwanted but inevitable choice. Consequently, responsibility should be not considered as a necessary requisite for the onset and the subjective experience of forced choice-related regret. Moreover, even the justifiability of the decision, which should decrease the intensity of regret ( Connolly and Zeelenberg, 2002 ), should not be relevant in the case of forced choice, because here regret should focus on the option one was forced to give up, not on the accuracy of decision process. In our studies, we tested specifically if these two appraisal dimensions (responsibility and decision justifiability) are necessary for the onset of regret.

Our hypothesis and their corollaries, which question the unicity of the genesis and experience of regret, raise the question of whether and on what criteria regret can be differentiated from other post-decision emotions.

Many authors support the hypothesis that emotions arising from decision-making have specific antecedents, patterns of appraisal, and phenomenology (see “Theoretical Background”). However, other authors ( Connolly and Butler, 2006 ) have pointed out that it would be more appropriate to classify these emotions, at least when they are self-reported, into two clusters: one formed by positive emotions (rejoicing, elation, happiness) and the other by negative emotions (regret, disappointment, sadness, and self-blame). Our position is somewhere in between these two. We believe that it is generally arbitrary to establish strict boundaries between emotions and that experiencing multiple or mixed emotions is the norm rather than the exception ( Sabini and Silver, 2005 ; Heavey et al., 2017 ; Watson and Stanton, 2017 ). However, we assume that there is, at least in principle, a partial or fuzzy correspondence between emotional lexicon and emotional experience ( Sini et al., 2014 ; Scherer and Fontaine, 2019 ) and between everyday life emotions, such as those investigated in the present studies, and theoretical emotions ( Clore et al., 1987 ).

We adopt the perspective of appraisal theories ( Frijda, 1986 ; Lazarus, 1991 ; Roseman, 2011 ; Lerner et al., 2015 ), according to which emotions are complex and targeted affective responses, which are based on appraisal dimensions and include experiential content and action tendencies. Hence, once emotions are activated, they lead us to interpret environmental events in line with the eliciting appraisals and to behave in order to pursue emotion-based goals. Thus, investigating the phenomenology of emotions is crucial to understand whether and to what extent different emotional words designate different emotional experiences, especially in situations from which a wide range of emotions can derive and there are many available labels to describe them.

We assume that an important decision made in a self-relevant domain results in a broad emotional reaction, where the composing emotions capture different aspects linked to decision-making both in overlapping and in mutually independent ways, so that each of them should have a specific configuration.

Along with regret, we investigated four emotions: disappointment, anger toward oneself, anger toward circumstances, and satisfaction. We focused our analysis on antecedents, and some appraisal and phenomenological aspects. In addition to disappointment, that is, the widely studied emotion that is closest to regret, the other emotions were chosen on the basis of the following criteria. Satisfaction, the only positive emotion, has been selected because it should increase with positive outcome. Moreover, since satisfaction refers to the affective reaction to one’s well-done actions ( Mellers, 2000 ), it does imply ego-involvement and thus should increase with free choice and decision justifiability. Anger has been included because it can be elicited by obstacles that prevent the achievement of a goal, by frustration, and by wrong or stupid actions ( Izard, 1991 ); such aspects are involved in forced choice, negative outcome, and bad (free) choice, respectively. Two types of anger have been distinguished as a function of the internal or external direction of this emotion, depending on the nature of its antecedents, appraisals, and phenomenology. Anger toward oneself arises from the self-attribution of a poor result and involves self-blame for having taken the wrong decision. Accordingly, it implies subjective responsibility and was supposed to increase with free choice and bad outcome, while decision justifiability should decrease it. Anger toward circumstances stems from the perception of an obstacle that interferes with one’s goals: Thus, it should increase with forced choice and bad outcome and entail external attribution of one’s situation. Disappointment should augment with forced choice and bad outcome for which one does not feel responsible. The two latter emotions should be not affected by decision justifiability because they should be focused on outcome rather than on choice.

Based on this analysis, we predicted some overlap between disappointment, regret, and anger toward circumstances, whereas the unique features attributed to regret should rather characterize anger toward oneself. In our view, the specificity of the nature of regret is that it can be elicited by opposite antecedents which, in turn, should generate contrasting subjective experiences.

Since we set out to systematically test our hypothesis about the importance of forced choice on the most relevant phenomena highlighted by research on regret, we also included in our investigation two well-known phenomena: the effect of the temporal dimension and of the type of behavior (action or inaction) resulting from decision-making on the intensity of regret.

We examined the first issue by considering the time elapsed from decision-making (a few days vs. a year) as a moderator of the effect of the type of choice. Instead, to investigate the second issue, we conducted two similar studies with two different samples: The only difference between them was that in the first study, the result of decision-making was an inaction, whereas in the second was an action.

According to the temporal theory of regret ( Gilovich and Medvec, 1994 , 1995 ), in the study on inaction, regret should be more intense in the long than in the short term, whereas in the study on action, the opposite pattern should be found. However, we left open the hypothesis of whether this pattern also concerns the forced choice-related regret, and we did not formulate specific hypotheses on the other emotions taken into consideration.

In the present studies, we adopted the scenario method, a widely used tool in the experimental studies on regret ( Connolly et al., 1997 ; Zeelenberg et al., 1998b , c ; Ordóñez and Connolly, 2000 , studies 2 and 3; Zeelenberg et al. , 2000b 2002 ). This method has the advantage of allowing easy experimental manipulation without running into ethical issues arising from putting participants in relevant real-world situations likely to generate distress or other intense emotional states. As well as other methods based on perspective taking, scenarios rely on the assumption that participants put themselves in the shoes of the protagonist and attribute to her/him what they would likely feel or think in a similar situation.

In general, studies based on perspective taking (regardless of the object of investigation and the type of technique used: scenario, photo, videotape, etc.) have used two types of instructions: imagine-self instructions and imagine-target instructions ( Davis et al., 2004 ). In the first case, the instructions asked participants to put themselves in the place of the protagonist and imagine what they would feel in that situation. In the second case, the instructions asked participants to imagine what the protagonist was thinking or feeling.

Although some studies have found that imagine-self instructions produced more emotional involvement than imagine-target instructions ( Batson et al., 1997 ; Davis et al., 2004 , study 1), other studies ( Davis et al., 2004 , study 2; Avenanti et al., 2006 ; Chambers and Davis, 2012 ) have found no difference between the two types of instructions. They rather suggest that perspective taking is the natural way to interact with others, unless it is inhibited by specific instructions.

In regret studies, both instructions were used, particularly the imagine-target instructions.

We used this type of instructions in our studies by asking participants to imagine as vividly as possible what the protagonist of the scenario was feeling and thinking.

The Studies

To test our hypothesis and its corollaries, two studies were conducted, each of them based on the scenario method. In both studies, the scenario protagonist had to make an important decision for her career. In the first study, the decision results in an inaction: The protagonist does not change her job position. In the second, the decision results in an action: She decide to change job.

In all scenarios, the outcome of the foregone option was known to the scenario protagonist: Thus, a requirement of rational decision theories was fulfilled. Actually, the protagonist could make a factual comparison between the consequences of both the chosen option and the nonchosen option, but he could also make a counterfactual comparison between his current situation (sometime after the decision) and what it might have been if he had made (or could have made) a different choice.

For each study, we used five moderated mediation models (depicted in Figure 1 ), one for each of the five emotions taken into account, to test our hypothesis. In each model, choice (forced vs. free) was included as independent variable; outcome (negative vs. positive) and time (long term vs. short term after decision-making) were included as moderators; some intervening variables, that is, decision justifiability, responsibility, and phenomenological aspects (see below for their description), were included as mediators; each of the five emotions was included as dependent variable. According to the tested hypothesis, choice, singularly and/or by interacting with the moderators, should affect emotion through the mediation of the intervening variables. In other words, the effect of choice on emotion could vary in function of moderators and should be exerted through an indirect way, by means of the effects on the intervening variables.

Figure 1 . Model 10 of PROCESS macro.

These variables were assessed (see Materials and Procedure section) by means of one direct question for decision justifiability (i.e., to what extent the scenario’s protagonist judged the reasons underlying his own decision as valid) and for responsibility (i.e., to what extent she felt responsible for her choice), respectively. Instead, the phenomenological aspects were assessed by means of 14 questions, concerning feelings and factual and counterfactual thoughts about the type of choice made, its context, its degree of freedom, and its consequences. These questions were formulated for taking into account three dimensions: self-attribution, external attribution, and contentment. Note that we did not take into account all the aspects of the emotion phenomenology, but only those we judged relevant for investigating the subjective repercussions deriving from the type of choice. More specifically, we considered neither the intentions nor the action tendencies of the protagonist.

We expected that, for both studies, the independent variable (choice) and the moderators (outcome and time) should differently affect both the five emotions and the mediators and that, in turn, the latter should affect the five emotions differently. Thus, choice should exert conditional (in interaction with moderators) direct and indirect (through mediators) effects on the five emotions. In the previous section, we delineated some of the principal effects we predicted and the reasons underlying these predictions.

We conducted both studies in the career domain, which has been considered as one of the main domains where regret can be produced ( Roese and Summerville, 2005 ; Sullivan et al., 2007 ; Verbruggen and De Vos, 2020 ). The scenarios presented two typical situations: deciding whether to accept a work assignment abroad for a certain period (study 1) and deciding which career to choose (study 2). They were conducted with employees of a wide age range (18–60 years): In this way, we tried to foster the identification of the participants with the protagonists of scenarios and to increase the ecological validity of the studies. In addition, the wide age range allowed us to investigate possible age-related differences in emotional reactions to the proposed decision situations.

Finally, it is worth specifying that in Italian, there are two terms corresponding to English regret, namely, rimpianto and rammarico , which are often used as synonyms, though their meaning varies slightly depending on the dictionaries (e.g., the Treccani Dictionary associates rammarico mainly with inaction, while the Garzanti Dictionary mainly associates rimpianto with inaction). We decided to select the most frequently occurring term on the web, which is rimpianto . For disappointment, the corresponding Italian term is delusione .

The study 1 investigated regret and other emotional reactions stemming from inaction.

Design and Participants

A 2 (choice: free vs. forced) × 2 (outcome: negative vs. positive) × 2 (time: short term vs. long term) between-subject design was carried out. Gender and age were considered as covariates. Three hundred thirty-six volunteer (unpaid) participants were recruited from different companies, sports centers, and universities in Campania. They were equally distributed by gender (168 males and 168 females), were aged between 18 and 60 (Mean = 33.45; S.D. = 10.82), and were randomly assigned to one of the 8 experimental conditions ( n  = 42 for each condition). All participants were employed. Among the students, only student workers were selected. Most of the participants (63.1%) had a high school diploma, 28.9% had a college degree, and 8% had completed compulsory education.

To determine the sample size, an a priori power analysis for ANCOVA on the five emotions taken into account was performed by using G*Power ( Faul et al., 2007 ). To detect a medium-small effect size ( f  = 0.20) and achieve a power of (1-β) of 0.95 with an error probability of 0.05, a minimum sample size of 327 participants was required. We decided to increase the number of participants to 336 in case we had to exclude someone for incomplete responses. Actually, no missing data were found. All participants executed the experimental task individually, at the place where they were recruited. They gave their informed consent before starting the experiment.

Materials and Procedure

In conformity with the experimental conditions, eight scenarios were built with the same structure and three sources of variation: type of choice (free vs. forced), outcome (negative vs. positive), and time (consequences of decision-making evaluated in long vs. short term). In all scenarios, the protagonist is an executive of a company who has to decide whether to accept the offer to manage for 2 years a branch that the company is planning to open abroad. The job is very well paid, and the sector in which the branch will operate is very interesting; moreover, the protagonist is offered the possibility of a significant career advancement once (s)he returns. In all scenarios, decision-making results in inaction: The protagonist decides to stay in the same workplace, and the assignment is given to a colleague. In the free choice conditions, the protagonist does not have any constraints: (s)he is aware that the proposal to manage the branch abroad is a great opportunity for her career but prefers to remain in her workplace.

In the forced choice conditions, a physical accident prevents the protagonist from choosing the desired option (going to manage the company branch abroad) and (s)he is therefore forced to choose to stay in the same workplace. In the positive outcome conditions, the protagonist gets a career advancement and a small pay raise. In the negative outcome conditions, the company decides to downsize some areas of production, including the one where the protagonist works, because the costs of opening the foreign branch have implied a restructuring of activities. Consequently, any possibility of career advancement disappears and the protagonist’s position in the company becomes much more marginal. In both types of outcomes, the colleague who has gone abroad is very happy with his/her work. The outcome is evaluated a few days (short term condition) or 1 year (long term condition) after the choice. For each experimental condition, in half of the scenarios the protagonist is a woman; in the other half, it is a man. However, the scenarios were assigned randomly to the participants, without doing any matching between the gender of the protagonist and the one of the participant.

In all experimental conditions, participants received a two-page booklet, in the first of which one of the eight short stories was reported. After reading the scenario, they were asked to imagine as vividly as possible the thoughts and feelings of the protagonist, and then to evaluate, on a nine-point scale (1 = not at all; 9 = very much):

•how important she felt the object of the decision was for her life (“how important does the protagonist feel the decision whether to accept or refuse to manage a company branch abroad was for her life?);

•whether she perceived her decision as a free choice (“To what extent does the protagonist feel the choice of not accepting to manage a company branch abroad was a free choice?);

•whether she felt responsible for her own choice (“To what extent does the protagonist feel responsible for not accepting to manage a company branch abroad?”);

•whether she judged her decision as justifiable (“To what extent does the protagonist judge the reasons for not accepting to manage a company branch abroad as valid?”);

•whether she judged her present working condition as positive (“To what extent does the protagonist judge her present working condition as positive?”).

In this way, the effectiveness of the experimental manipulation was checked and two of the putative mediation variables between type of choice and regret, that is, responsibility and decision justifiability, were assessed. Henceforth, the five variables will be labelled as Intermediate Variables (InVs).

Successively, participants evaluated on a nine-point scale (1 = not at all; 9 = very much) how intensely the protagonist was supposed to feel five emotions: anger toward circumstances, anger toward oneself, disappointment, regret, and satisfaction.

Finally, they estimated on a nine-point scale (1 = not likely at all; 9 = extremely likely) the probability with which the protagonist was supposed to agree with the 14 items of a questionnaire describing thoughts (including counterfactual thoughts) and feelings related to the emotional experience. The questionnaire (reported in Figure 2 ) was built in order to capture the protagonist’s possible reactions at the time of evaluating the outcome of his decision in relation to three dimensions:

•self-attribution of the outcome due to free choice (e.g., The situation I am currently in is due to the decision I freely made; If I had chosen differently, my situation would be better now; The responsibility for the situation I am currently in is mine);

•external attribution of the outcome due to forced choice (e.g., The situation I am currently in is due to the decision I was forced to make; At the time of the decision I knew that the outcome of my choice would be worse than I wanted; I know I could not have chosen differently);

•affective evaluation of the current state (e.g., I am happy with the consequences of my choice; I am not happy with the way things turned out).

Figure 2 . Items of the phenomenology questionnaire.

Four different random sequences including the five InVs, the five emotions, and the 14 items of the questionnaire were built, and the participants were pseudo-randomly assigned to the sequences.

It is worthy to note that the we used two questions on responsibility. The first question asked how responsible the protagonist felt for her own choice when it was made and aimed to evaluate the perceived appraisal of the type of choice; the other question was in the phenomenology questionnaire and asked how responsible she felt for the situation in which she was in at the moment of the evaluation of the decision consequences.

After completing the questionnaire, participants gave back the booklet. They were asked whether they had any questions and then were thanked for their participation.

Before conducting the experiment, a pilot study was carried out with 20 unpaid volunteer employees in order to test the believability of the scenarios, the clarity of the instructions (with particular reference to manipulation check questions), and the perceived importance of the target of the decision-making. No changes were required after this study.

All data analyses were carried out using SPSS 18.0 IBM software.

Manipulation Check

In Table 1 , the means and standard deviations of the participants’ responses to the five InVs (importance, responsibility, perception of the freedom of the choice, decision justifiability, and evaluation of present working condition) and the five dependent variables (DVs, regret, disappointment, satisfaction, anger toward oneself, and anger toward circumstances) are shown as a function of the independent variables (IVs, choice, outcome, and time).

Table 1 . Study 1 – means and standard deviations (S.D.) of intermediate variables and emotions as a function of choice, outcome, and time.

The first analysis, a 2 x 2 x 2 MANCOVA, was performed to check whether the manipulated experimental conditions affected the five InVs in the predicted directions. Gender (M = 1; F  = 0) and age of participants were included as covariates. The multivariate tests were significant for all the three IVs. The univariate tests revealed three main effects due to choice, outcome, and time, and two interaction effects: outcome x choice and time x choice. The main effects were examined through pairwise comparisons with Bonferroni correction; the interaction effects were examined through simple effects analysis with Bonferroni adjustment. Choice affected all the InVs, except importance: responsibility, perception of the freedom of the choice, and positive evaluation of present working condition increased with free choice, while decision justifiability increased with forced choice. Outcome affected only the positive evaluation of present working condition, which increased with positive outcome, and importance, which increased with negative outcome. Time affected the positive evaluation of present working condition, responsibility, and importance, all of which increased in long term. The outcome × choice interaction affected the positive evaluation of present working condition, which increased with positive outcome and free choice compared to positive outcome and forced choice. The time × choice interaction concerned importance, which increased with forced choice compared to free choice in short term, while in long term, there was no difference as a function of the type of choice. No effects were due to gender or age. In Supplementary Table 1 , the results of the MANCOVA are reported.

Effects of Choice, Outcome, and Time on Emotion Intensity

Subsequently, five 2 x 2 x 2 ANCOVAs were conducted on the five emotions to test the effects of the three IVs on their intensity. Gender and age were included as covariates.

The results (reported in Supplementary Table 2 ) showed that all emotions were affected by choice and outcome, separately and in interaction; moreover, anger toward oneself and satisfaction were affected also by time, while regret, anger toward oneself, and anger toward circumstances were also influenced by the three-way interaction time x outcome x choice. The main and the interaction effects were examined with the same procedure described for the MANCOVA. In detail, regret, disappointment, and anger toward circumstances increased with forced choice, while anger toward oneself and satisfaction increased with free choice; all emotions increased with negative outcome, except satisfaction, which increased with positive outcome. Anger toward oneself and satisfaction increased in long term. Regret and disappointment increased with forced choice when the outcome was positive, whereas no difference in intensity was found as a function of the type of choice when the outcome was negative. However, by examining these interactions as a function of the type of choice, the results slightly differed for the two emotions: With free choice, the intensity of regret increased when the outcome was negative, while with forced choice, such an intensity was always high irrespective of the outcome. On the contrary, the intensity of disappointment always increased with negative outcome, even if this effect was higher with free than forced choice. In addition, for regret, the two-way interaction was further qualified in light of the three-way interaction: With free choice, its intensity was much higher when the outcome was negative rather than positive, both in short and in long term; instead, with forced choice, there was no intensity difference depending on outcome in short term, whereas in long term, the regret intensity slightly increased when the outcome was negative.

Anger toward oneself increased with free choice compared to forced choice when the outcome was negative, whereas with positive outcome, no difference in intensity was found as a function of the type of choice: The average scores were always quite low. In light of the three-way interaction, this emotion always increased with free choice compared to forced choice, except for short term and positive outcome, where no significant difference emerged as a function of choice: Its intensity was low both in free and forced choice. Anger toward circumstances increased with forced choice in both types of outcome, but this effect was higher with positive outcome. When considering the three-way interaction, this emotion increased with forced choice in all conditions, except for short term and negative outcome, where the intensity did not vary as a function of the type of choice.

Satisfaction increased with free choice but only in positive outcome condition; indeed, no intensity difference was found depending on choice when the outcome was negative.

All emotions except satisfaction increased in females compared to males. No effects were due to age.

Phenomenological Dimensions and Moderated Mediation Analyses

To reduce the number of items presented in the questionnaire on the emotional experience, a factor analysis with the principal component extraction method was conducted. Before the analysis, one negative item concerning contentment dimension (“I’m not happy with the way things turned out”) was reverse-coded. Varimax rotation was used after controlling, through Oblimin rotation, that there was no correlation higher than 0.30 among components. Three components with eigenvalue >1, explaining 65.11% of the total variance, were extracted. The three components and the items loading on each of them corresponded to those that had been hypothesized in the construction of the questionnaire. They were labelled self-attribution , external attribution , and contentment . The values of Cronbach’s alpha for each dimension were 0.861, 0.773, and 0.796, respectively. The results are reported in Table 2 . The factor scores were saved for the subsequent analyses.

Table 2 . Study 1 – rotated component matrix of phenomenology questionnaire.

To test the central hypothesis of the study, five moderated mediation analyses were performed. This analysis ( Muller et al., 2005 ; Hayes, 2018a , b ; Hayes and Rockwood, 2020 ) examines whether the putative effect of the independent variable (IV) on the dependent variable (DV) is exerted through intermediate variables – Mediators – and whether the mediated effect differs as a function of the values of other variables included in the design – Moderators – which are supposed to affect the relationship between VI, Mediators, and DV. All moderated mediation analyses were conducted using the PROCESS macro for SPSS 3.1 ( Hayes, 2018a ), which allows 92 different models of moderation, mediation and moderated mediation analyses to be tested. The macro employs a bootstrapping method for estimating indirect effects, that is, the effects of IV on DV through mediating variables at different values of moderators: 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals were calculated through 10,000 bootstrap samples.

In each analysis, we tested a model (model 10 of PROCESS macro, see Figure 1 ), according to which the type of choice (IV) should affect, singularly or in interaction with outcome and time (Moderators), the corresponding emotion (DV) through the mediation of 5 variables: responsibility, decision justifiability, and the three dimensions extracted from the factor analysis, that is, self-attribution, external attribution, and contentment. For each analysis, choice (1 = forced choice; 0 = free choice), outcome (1 = negative outcome; 0 = positive outcome), and time (1 = long term; 0 = short term) were included in the model as dummy variables. Gender (1 = male; 0 = female) and age were included as covariates.

All results were examined with reference to the intercept (i.e., free choice, positive outcome, and short term). Concerning the relationship between the IV and/or the moderators and the mediators (which was the same for each analysis), the results were similar to those of the MANCOVA and were reported in Supplementary Material ( Supplementary Table 3 and subsequent description).

When mediators were included in the model, the results on the five emotions (reported in Supplementary Table 4 ) were the following. The probability of regret increased with forced choice, negative outcome, self-attribution, and external attribution, while decreased with contentment. The conditional direct effect of choice on the probability of regret was moderated by outcome and time, being significant only for positive outcome and short time, as the ANCOVA already showed. The conditional indirect effects of choice through self-attribution and external attribution were not moderated by outcome and time, since they were significant for both types of outcome and both in short and long term. More precisely, self-attribution, which decreased with forced choice, increased regret: So, the indirect effect was negative. Instead, external attribution, which increased with forced choice, increased regret: So, the indirect effect was positive. The conditional indirect effect of choice through contentment was moderated by outcome, being significant only with positive outcome, in both values of time. In detail, the probability of contentment, which decreased with forced choice and positive outcome, decreased regret: Thus, the indirect effect was positive.

The probability of anger toward oneself increased with negative outcome, responsibility, and self-attribution and decreased with decision justifiability, contentment, and with the interaction choice x outcome. The negative interaction replicated the results already highlighted by ANCOVA, that is, the effect of negative outcome diminished with forced choice. Choice exerted indirect effects through responsibility and self-attribution and conditional indirect effects through decision justifiability and contentment. In detail, irrespective of the values of outcome or time, forced choice decreased responsibility and self-attribution, which in turn increased anger toward oneself: Thus, the indirect effects were negative and were not moderated by outcome or time. Instead, these variables moderated the indirect effect of forced choice through decision justifiability, which was significant only with negative outcome and long term, and through contentment, which was significant only with positive outcome, both in short and in long term: In these conditions, forced choice decreased contentment, which in turn decreased the probability of anger toward oneself, making the indirect effect positive.

The probability of disappointment increased with negative outcome and external attribution, while decreased with contentment. Choice exerted indirect effects through external attribution and conditional indirect effects through contentment. Specifically, independently on the values of outcome and time, forced choice increased external attribution, which in turn increased the probability of disappointment. Instead, the indirect effect of choice was moderated by outcome, being significant only with positive outcome, in short and long term: In these conditions, forced choice decreased contentment, which in turn decreased the probability of disappointment, making the indirect effect positive.

The probability of anger toward circumstances increased with negative outcome, external attribution, and the choice x time interaction, whereas decreased with self-attribution, contentment, and the choice x outcome interaction. Choice exerted a conditional direct effect through positive outcome and long term: The effect of negative outcome decreased with forced choice, where the probability of the emotion was high in both outcomes (negative interaction choice x outcome); with forced choice, the probability of the emotion increased in the long term (positive interaction choice x time). Choice exerted indirect effects through self-attribution and external attribution and conditional indirect effect through contentment. More precisely, irrespective of the values of outcome and time, forced choice decreased the effect of self-attribution and increased the effect of external attribution. The former dimension decreased anger toward circumstances, whereas the latter increased it. Thus, the indirect effects became positive in both cases. Instead, the indirect effect through contentment was significant only for positive outcome, in both values of time: In these conditions, forced choice diminished contentment, which in turn diminished this emotion, making the conditional indirect effect positive.

The probability of satisfaction decreased with negative outcome and increased with decision justifiability and contentment. Choice exerted only a conditional indirect effect through contentment. Indeed, with positive outcome, in both short and long term, forced choice diminished contentment, which in turn increased satisfaction. Thus, such an effect was negative.

The probability of all emotions, except satisfaction, decreased in males compared to females. No significant effects were due to age.

Study 2 was conducted to investigate regret and other emotional reactions that originate from decision-making resulting in action.

It had the same structure as study 1, except for the scenarios.

Participants

Once again participants were 336 unpaid volunteers, aged between 18 and 60 (Mean = 32.25; S.D. = 11.72). They were recruited in the same way as study 1, and all were workers. Thus, also in this study, participants were equally distributed by gender. More than half of them (55.7%) had a high school diploma, 31.8% had a college degree, and 12.5% had completed compulsory education.

The eight scenarios (choice x outcome x time) were built around the following plot: The protagonist chooses to leave a promising basketball career to work in a company. In the free choice conditions, s/he does not feel like facing the risks and uncertainties of a sports career and prefers to opt for a safer job. S/he therefore leaves basketball and finds a job with a solid company. In the forced choice conditions, a physical accident prevents the protagonist from continuing his sports career and he is therefore forced to seek a job that is compatible with his changed physical conditions. Finally, he finds employment with a solid company. In the positive outcome conditions, the protagonist realizes that the new job, although a bit monotonous, leaves him free time to cultivate his interests and is also well paid. In the negative outcome conditions, the protagonist realizes that her job does not highlight her skills, is monotonous, and does not provide for career advancement. In all conditions, the protagonist learns that his place on the basketball team has been taken by another player who has also turned out to be very good. The outcome is evaluated a few days (short-term conditions) or 1 year (long-term conditions) after the choice. For each experimental condition, half of times the protagonist is a woman; the other half it is a man.

The procedure and the other materials were the same as study 1. Only the 5 manipulation check questions were slightly modified to adapt them to the different scenarios. For example, the question on the responsibility was the following: “To what extent does the protagonist feel responsible to take on another job instead of a sports career?” The question on the decision justifiability was the following “To what extent does the protagonist consider the reasons for taking another job instead of a sports career to be valid?”

Also before this experiment, a pilot study was carried out with 20 volunteer employees in order to test the plausibility of the scenarios and the clarity of the instructions. No changes were needed after this study.

The same statistical analyses of study 1 were performed also for study 2.

In Table 3 , the means and standard deviations of the participants’ responses to the five intermediate variables and the five emotions are shown as a function of the independent variables.

Table 3 . Study 2 – means and standard deviations (S.D.) of intermediate variables and emotions as a function of choice, outcome, and time.

The results of the 2x2x2 MANCOVA conducted on the InVs (importance, responsibility, perception of the freedom of the choice, decision justifiability, positive evaluation of present working condition), with age and gender as covariates, showed that multivariate tests were significant for age, for the three IVs, for choice x time and outcome x time interactions. The univariate tests revealed that choice affected all InVs; outcome affected decision justifiability and evaluation of present working condition; time affected the perception of the freedom of the choice; choice x time affected responsibility and perception of the freedom of the choice; outcome x time affected the evaluation of present working condition. Pairwise comparisons and simple effects analysis, both of them with Bonferroni adjustment, were used to investigate main and interaction effects. All InVs increased with free choice; decision justifiability and positive evaluation of present working condition increased with positive outcome; in short term, the perception of the freedom of the choice augmented. The interaction between choice and time revealed that with free choice, the responsibility did not vary as a function of time, whereas with forced choice, responsibility was higher in long than in short term. On the contrary, the perception of the freedom of the choice was independent of time in the forced choice condition, while it was higher in short than in long term with free choice. The outcome x time interaction showed that, with positive outcome, the evaluation of present working condition did not vary depending on time, whereas, with negative outcome, this evaluation was more positive in long than in short time. The evaluation of the protagonist’s present working condition was more positive as the age of the participants increased. No significant effects were due to gender. In Supplementary Table 5 , the results of the MANCOVA are reported.

The five 2x2x2 ANCOVAs conducted on the five emotions (with gender and age as covariates) to test the effects of the three IVs on their intensity showed that all emotions were affected by choice and by outcome; moreover, regret, disappointment, and anger toward oneself were also affected by choice x outcome interaction. More specifically, regret, disappointment, and anger toward circumstances increased with forced choice, whereas anger toward oneself and satisfaction increased with free choice; all emotions increased with negative outcome, except for satisfaction, which increased with positive outcome. The intensity of regret and disappointment increased with forced choice compared to free choice, when outcome was positive, while no significant difference depending on choice was found when the outcome was negative. Anger toward oneself always increased with free choice compared to forced choice but this effect was higher with negative than with positive outcome. Regret diminished when the participants’ age increased, whereas the opposite effect was found on satisfaction. No significant effects were due to gender. In Supplementary Table 6 , the results of the ANCOVAs are reported.

The factor analysis performed to reduce the number of items presented in the questionnaire on the emotional experience yielded similar results to study 1.

Three components with eigenvalue >1, explaining 62.54% of the total variance, were extracted following the same procedure of study 1. The items loading on each component were the same of study 1. Once again, the components were labelled self-attribution , external attribution , and contentment . The values of Cronbach’s alpha for each dimension were 0.850, 0.704, and 0.831, respectively. The results are reported in Table 4 . The factor scores were saved for the subsequent analyses.

Table 4 . Study 2 – rotated component matrix of phenomenology questionnaire.

Also in study 2, five moderated mediation analyses were performed to investigate whether the effect of choice on the five emotions was moderated by outcome or time and was mediated by responsibility, decision justifiability, and the three dimensions extracted from the factor analysis, that is, self-attribution, external attribution, and contentment. The model 10 of the Process macro 3.1 for SPSS ( Hayes, 2018a ) was tested again (see Figure 1 ) following the same procedure of study 1.

All results were interpreted with reference to the intercept (i.e., free choice, positive outcome, and short term).

The results concerning the relationship between choice and/or the moderators and the mediators (which was the same for each analysis) were similar to those of the MANCOVA and were reported in Supplementary Material (see Supplementary Table 7 and subsequent description).

After including the mediators in the model, the results on the five emotions were the following.

The probability of regret increased with forced choice, negative outcome, self-attribution, and external attribution, while decreased with contentment, choice × outcome interaction, and the participants’ age. The conditional direct effect of choice on the probability of regret was moderated by outcome, being significant only for positive outcome (as the ANCOVA showed). Indeed, the negative interaction between choice and outcome indicated that with forced choice the effect of negative outcome decreased because in these conditions the probability of regret was high in both outcomes (a result already highlighted by the ANCOVA). The conditional indirect effects of choice through self-attribution and external attribution were not moderated by outcome and time, since they were significant for both types of outcome and both in short and long term. The signs of these effects were the same as in study 1. The conditional indirect effect of choice through contentment was moderated by outcome, being significant only with positive outcome, in both values of time. The sign of this effect was positive, as well as in study 1.

The probability of anger toward oneself increased with negative outcome, responsibility, and self-attribution and decreased with decision justifiability, contentment, and with the choice x outcome interaction. The negative interaction replicated the results already showed by ANCOVA, that is, the probability of this emotion increased with negative outcome, when the choice was free, but this effect decreased when the choice was forced because the intensity of anger toward oneself was low in both outcomes. Choice exerted an indirect effect through self-attribution and a conditional indirect effect through contentment. More specifically, regardless of the values of outcome or time, forced choice decreased self-attribution, which in turn increased anger toward oneself: Thus, the indirect effect was negative and was not moderated by outcome or time. Instead, the indirect effect of choice was moderated by outcome, being significant only with positive outcome, both in short and in long term: Here, forced choice decreased contentment, which in turn decreased the probability of anger toward oneself, making the indirect effect positive.

The probability of disappointment increased with negative outcome and external attribution, while decreased with contentment and with choice × outcome interaction. The latter indicated that with negative outcome, the probability of disappointment increased with free choice but that with forced choice this effect decreased because the intensity of disappointment was quite similar in both outcomes. Choice exerted a positive indirect effect through external attribution and a positive conditional indirect effect through contentment, as well as in study 1.

The probability of anger toward circumstances increased with forced choice, negative outcome, external attribution, and decreased with responsibility and contentment. The effect of choice was moderated by outcome, being significant only with positive outcome in both values of time: With positive outcome, the probability of this emotion was higher in forced than in free choice, while with negative outcome, it was similar in both types of choice.

Choice exerted an indirect effect through external attribution and a conditional indirect effect through contentment. More precisely, irrespective of the values of outcome and time, forced choice increased the effect of external attribution, which in turn increased the probability of this emotion: Thus, the indirect effect was positive. Instead, the indirect effect through contentment was significant only for positive outcome in both values of time: here forced choice diminished contentment, which in turn diminished the probability of anger toward circumstances, making the conditional indirect effect positive.

The probability of satisfaction decreased with negative outcome and increased with contentment and the participants’ age. Choice exerted only a conditional indirect effect through contentment. Indeed, with positive outcome, in both short and long term, forced choice diminished contentment, which in turn increased satisfaction. Thus, such an effect was negative.

The effects of age were found only on regret and satisfaction, whereas no significant effects were due to gender. These results are reported in Supplementary Table 8 .

The results of these studies largely support our hypothesis. We will first discuss the results that are common to both of them and then the differences between them. In particular, we will discuss the effect of the temporal dimension on the five emotions afterward, since it was somewhat different in the two studies.

Both studies showed that a forced choice is a relevant source of regret. Regardless of whether the decision-making resulted in action or inaction, regret was more intense when elicited by a forced than a free choice. Indeed, while regret was always high when the outcome was negative, irrespective of the type of choice, forced choice-related regret did not diminish with a positive outcome, contrarily to regret elicited by a free choice. Actually, in both studies, this pattern was similar also for disappointment, a finding already found by some authors ( Connolly and Butler, 2006 ; Matarazzo and Abbamonte, 2008 ), suggesting that for lay people the two emotions are more similar than both decision theorists and many psychologists have argued. Moreover, neither regret nor disappointment was affected by the two appraisal dimensions we took into account, responsibility for the choice and decision justifiability. Once again, this finding disconfirms the prevailing theoretical perspective on regret which considers responsibility as both a necessary requisite for regret and a discriminant criterion for differentiating it from disappointment (see Theoretical background section). Besides, decision justifiability has been considered as a powerful condition capable of reducing the regret intensity ( Connolly and Zeelenberg, 2002 ), at least as to concerns the amount of regret deriving from deciding badly ( Pieters and Zeelenberg, 2005 ). However, in our studies, responsibility and/or decision justifiability did not affect regret but the two types of anger and satisfaction, as we will discuss later.

Note that in both studies, the manipulation of responsibility, and more generally of all intermediate variables, was successful: Responsibility increased with free compared to forced choice, suggesting that participants understood the meaning of the term correctly. As concerns decision justifiability, this variable increased with forced vs. free choice in the first study, whereas the opposite result emerged from the second study: Anyway, in both studies, the average scores were always high or medium-high, implying that participants felt that the reasons underlying the decision of the scenario’s protagonist were well-founded. Thus, the finding that two appraisal dimensions were irrelevant not only for disappointment but also for regret indicates that responsibility is not a necessary requisite for regret and that the DJT ( Connolly and Zeelenberg, 2002 ) does not take into account all the sources of regret. Our results reveal that the importance of the forced choice has been disregarded. However, our studies suggest that the distinction between regret and disappointment, as well as the other emotions taken into account, can be identified in the phenomenological aspects we investigated. More precisely, the moderated mediation analyses showed that, in conformity with our assumptions, each of the five emotions considered, while having some overlapping characteristics, had a specific profile resulting from the way in which for each of them the relationship between antecedents, appraisal, and phenomenological aspects took shape. As mentioned above, to build the phenomenology questionnaire, we have used some items describing the thoughts and feeling linked to a free choice resulting in a bad outcome, that is, self-blame, upward counterfactuals, awareness of the freedom of the choice, and self-accountability. In addition, we have thought of a version of the same items, which was compatible with a forced choice. Finally, we have used some items describing the affective (positive and negative) correlates of the decision consequences. In both studies, the three phenomenological dimensions (self-attribution, external attribution, and contentment) were affected by the type of choice in the expected direction: Self-attribution increased with free choice and with negative outcome, whereas external attribution increased with forced choice but was independent of the outcome. Contentment increased with free choice and positive outcome.

In both studies, the moderated mediation analyses showed that regret was the only emotion that increased with both self-attribution and external attribution, whereas decreased with contentment as well as all other negative emotions. In addition, it was the only emotion on which choice exerted both a direct (in interaction with outcome and/or time) and an indirect (through phenomenology) effect in both studies. In our opinion, this is the most relevant finding of these studies since it supports the hypothesis that regret derives from two types of choice and that the forced choice is at least as important as the free choice. In addition, it suggests that the emotional experience of regret is more complex than it is generally thought in literature.

Disappointment increased with external attribution but was not affected by self-attribution. Consequently, although this emotion has the same relationship as regret to antecedents and the two appraisals, its phenomenology is primarily focused on awareness of forced choice. This result questions the dominant conception of disappointment because it reveals how central the relationship with the choice, not just with the outcome, is in its phenomenology.

Anger toward circumstances was the other emotion with similar characteristics to regret. In both studies, it increased with forced choice, negative outcome, and external attribution. Nevertheless, in the first study, this emotion decreased with self-attribution, instead of increasing like regret; in the second study, it decreased when responsibility increased, whereas responsibility never affects regret.

The negative emotion that most differed from regret was anger toward oneself. In both studies, it was the only emotion that increased with free choice in the presence of a negative outcome. With a positive outcome, in fact, the emotion decreased with both types of choice. Furthermore, it increased with responsibility, self-attribution, and decreased with decision justifiability, while it was not affected by external attribution. These results suggest that, at least for the participants in our studies, anger toward oneself is the emotion that encompasses the features that the mainstream of the economic and psychological literature attribute to regret. We will discuss this issue later.

As to concerns satisfaction – the only positive emotion we took into account because of manipulation of the outcome – the results are congruent with the predictions derived by appraisal theories: In both studies, it increased with positive outcome, free choice, and contentment; in the first study, it also increased with decision justifiability. As expected, neither of the other two dimensions of phenomenology had any effect on it.

Although the results of the two studies were very similar, some differences regarding the temporal dimension and the two covariates emerged: Now, we will briefly discuss them.

In study 2, time did not affect the intensity of emotions, but did affect responsibility, self-attribution, and external attribution in interaction with choice. Summing up, when the choice was forced, responsibility and self-attribution tended to be lower in the short than in the long term, whereas with free choice, they were always very high. The probability of external attribution increased in the long term with free choice, whereas it was always high in both time measures when choice was forced.

In study 1, the effect of time was more relevant, since it concerned responsibility, the same two phenomenological dimensions, and almost all emotions except disappointment. Responsibility, self-attribution, and external attribution increased in the long term, even if the effect on self-attribution was produced in interaction with choice. The effect of time on regret, anger toward oneself, and anger toward circumstances was moderated by the three-way interaction with choice and outcome. Thus, in neither study did we find sufficiently clear and robust results to make a congruent explanatory hypothesis. Although the temporal dimension was more significant when decision-making resulted in inaction rather than in action, our findings do not support the temporal theory of regret ( Gilovich and Medvec, 1994 , 1995 ), according to which regret related to an omission should be more intense in the long than in the short term. In our first study, both regret and the two types of anger showed such a tendency only in specific interactions with choice and outcome. Moreover, as to concerns regret, the difference in intensity due to the passage of time occurred between two experimental conditions where the average scores were particularly low, that is, the conditions with free choice and positive outcome, compared in short and long term. Consequently, it seems more appropriate to infer from our results that, regardless whether regret derives from an omission or a commission, its intensity is independent of temporal dimension.

The other differences between our two studies concern the effect of gender and age. In the first study, all emotions except satisfaction increased in females compared to males, whereas no significant effects were due to age. In study 2, gender did not affect results, but regret diminished with age, whereas satisfaction and contentment increased with it.

To the best of our knowledge, only few studies found a gender difference between action and inaction regrets, in the opposite direction to our studies. In the context of romantic ( Roese et al., 2006 ) or sexual ( Kennair et al., 2016 ) relationships, men tend to feel more regrets for initiatives or opportunities which were not taken (inaction); instead, women tend to regret choosing an inappropriate partner or having casual sex (action). In other domains, such as education, achievement, or social relationships, no gender difference seems to have been discovered (e.g., Beike et al., 2009 ; Davidai and Gilovich, 2018 ), although Morrison and Roese (2011) found that men reported more action-focused life regrets than women. Moreover, some studies in the career domain have found that women regret not having followed their calling ( Stewart and Vandewater, 1999 ; Wrzesniewski et al., 2006 ; Newton et al., 2012 ). Thus, we speculated that in study 1, women identified more than men with the protagonist of the omission scenarios and attributed a greater intensity of regret to him/her than men did.

As regards the effect of age found in study 2, which shows that as a function of age regret decreased whereas satisfaction and contentment increased, to our knowledge, no other studies have found this effect. The studies that focused on the relationship between regret and subjective well-being in the life cycle ( Jokisaari, 2003 ; Wrosch et al., 2005 ) or on collecting life regret in a US representative sample ( Morrison and Roese, 2011 ) did not find any age difference in the action effect. The suggestion stemming from the research on emotion regulation, according to which old adults are often more capable to regulate negative emotions than the young ( Carstensen et al., 2003 ; Blanchard-Fields et al., 2004 ), is hardly plausible, since this effect was limited to action-based scenarios and did not extend to omission-based scenarios. Although this finding does not concern the main goals of our research nor was expected, we think that it deserves to be further investigated in future research.

To conclude this discussion, we would like to focus on two points.

The first concerns the question of whether the difference between our results and the majority of those reported in the literature is merely a matter of terminology. As we wrote above, the studies dealing with terms from everyday life, as in our case, always have to deal with the problem that there is no one-to-one correspondence between the terms as they are used by lay people and as they are conceived in the specialist literature ( Nisbett and Wilson, 1977 ). This is particularly true when referring to emotions ( Sabini and Silver, 2005 ) and when comparing studies conducted in different countries and with different languages (e.g., Giorgetta et al., 2012 ). However, in response to this possible objection, it should be noted that the assumption underlying the translatability of one language into another is that there is at least partial overlap between the meaning of the terms in different languages, in the sense that they designate similar referents.

Perhaps the terms rimpianto (or rammarico ) and regret are not completely superimposable, nor are the English and Italian terms of the other emotions investigated, therefore in our studies, we have considered the appraisal and phenomenological aspects of emotions to overcome this possible issue. The success of the manipulation check suggests that participants found the proposed stories believable and that they interpreted them correctly. Thus, the emotional reaction attributed to the protagonists of the stories seems to be plausible, and this seems to confer ecological validity to the studies.

The use of the scenario method is the final point on which we would like to focus.

As we wrote in The rationale of the studies section, this method has the advantage of allowing an accurate manipulation of the experimental variables, especially if the object of the studies concerns decisions in a self-relevant domain and not trivial everyday decisions. The latter can easily be the object of behavioral experiments, because the manipulation of the variables related to them does not raise the ethical issues that would arise in manipulating self-relevant variables. However, the fact that emotional reactions are attributed to a third person and not felt in the first person could cast doubts on the correspondence between the participants’ real subjective experience and the one attributed to the scenario protagonist. We think there are several ways to respond to such an objection. The first is that perspective taking has been considered as a natural aptitude of living being, rooted in the brain. Notably, simulation theory ( Gordon, 1986 ; Goldman, 1989 , 1992 ; Gallese and Goldman, 1998 ) assumes that the natural way of attributing mental states to others rests on the automatic ability of humans to imagine what they would feel in the situation the other person is in and to extend their own thoughts and feelings to the other person. Second, several studies on perspective taking reported in The rationale of the studies section showed that people tend to put themselves in the other person’s shoes, regardless of whether the instructions request to do it. Third, the fact that in the scenario method, people do not feel directly investigated can allow them to express more freely what they would really think or feel in a similar situation.

Finally, even if one admits that there is not a total correspondence between the experience in first and in third person, the scope of our studies was to compare the emotional reactions elicited, or supposed to be elicited, by free vs. forced choice. Since these reactions were investigated through the same method, the comparison between them remains valid regardless of the possible difference between emotions experienced in the first or third person.

Overall, we believe that our results can contribute to a deeper understanding of regret and other post-decision emotions along three directions: First, they suggest that the conception of regret derived from decision theorists is too binding, since it posits as necessary some requirements which are not. Second, they reveal that the antecedents and phenomenology of regret are broader than it is generally believed. Third, they reveal that decision-making (specially when its object is important for our life) does not elicit a reduced number of sharply separated emotions; rather, it produces a complex emotional constellation, where the different emotions, singularly and/or in combination with the others, constitute the affective responses to the different aspects of the decision-making process. The emotions we took into account capture some of these aspects, although they are far from covering them all.

Limitations and Future Research

In our opinion, the major limitation of our studies is that we did not consider the possible behavioral consequences of emotional experiences. In this way, we have omitted to investigate the motivational function of emotions ( Frijda, 1986 ; Lazarus, 1991 ; Roseman, 2011 ) and, consequently, to examine further differences and similarities between the five emotions considered.

If we had asked the participants what the protagonist of the scenario was thinking of doing to deal with the situation she was experiencing, we would have had a more complete picture of the emotional experiences investigated, since the behavioral consequences would also have been included. Future research should investigate these aspects.

Data Availability Statement

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14444417.v1 .

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Department of Psychology - University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

OM conceptualized the studies, analyzed the data, and wrote the manuscript. CG and BP conducted literature searches, collected the data, and prepared the figures and tables. LA and GN revised the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

The department of Psychology of the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli paid the publication fee.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021. 783248/full#supplementary-material

1. ^ The term phenomenology designates the set of feeling, thinking, intentions, and action tendencies that characterize the experience of emotion (see for example, Frijda, 1987 , 2009 ; Roseman et al., 1994 ).

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Keywords: regret, decision-making, post-decision emotions, antecedents, appraisals, phenomenology

Citation: Matarazzo O, Abbamonte L, Greco C, Pizzini B and Nigro G (2021) Regret and Other Emotions Related to Decision-Making: Antecedents, Appraisals, and Phenomenological Aspects. Front. Psychol . 12:783248. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.783248

Received: 25 September 2021; Accepted: 02 November 2021; Published: 16 December 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Matarazzo, Abbamonte, Greco, Pizzini and Nigro. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Olimpia Matarazzo, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

33 Writing Prompts about Regret

We all regret things in our lives. While regret is not a great feeling, it is an important one.

You may experience regret because of a mistake you made, or from not following through on something that you wish you did.

The upside to regret is that your inner thoughts are signaling to you to learn and make a better choice in the future, should a similar situation happen again.

We hope these writing prompts will help expand your mind and understand regret a little more. We know that you won’t regret reading them!

How to use these prompts:

Writing should be creative and fun, and that’s exactly why we provide these prompts!

You can make your own writing challenge by choosing one prompt per day or set a timer and write as much as you can for a prompt of your choice.

There is no right or wrong way to use these prompts, all you have to do is pick one and start writing.

The writing prompts:

• Have you ever regretted trying a new food?
• What is one thing you regret? Why?
• Some people say they have “no regrets.” Do you agree or disagree with this idea?
• Why do you think regret is important to acknowledge?
• What are some positive ways to deal with regrets?
• What is one thing you don’t regret? Why?
• If regret was a person, what would they be like?
• Invent a character and write about something they regret.
• Have you ever regretted something you said? What could you have said differently?
• When you regret something, how does it make you feel?
• What music do you think of when you think of the feeling of regret?
• Have you ever regretted not doing something?
• Where do you think the word regret comes from?
• Is it okay to have regrets?
• Write yourself a letter forgiving yourself for something you regret.
• How can you learn from your regrets?
• Write a story about a person that regrets everything they do.
• How long do you typically feel regret? Is it ongoing or does it last a few days?
• If you don’t acknowledge a regret, does it get better or worse?
• Have you ever talked to someone else about their regrets? Write about it. If not, imagine you are having a conversation with a family member or friend and write about that.
• Imagine there is a day when you cannot experience regret. What would it be like? What about the next day, when things go back to normal?
• Can you regret too much?
• Write a story about a person that never experiences regret and how they live their life.
• What kinds of things do people regret? What do they have in common? How are they different?
• What advice would you give to someone who is dealing with regret?
• Would you prefer to live with no regrets? Why or why not?
• Is regret always negative? Why or why not?
• Have you ever regretted going somewhere? Why or why not?
• Is regret the same thing as feeling sorry? Why or why not?
• What do you do after you regret something?
• How can you turn regret into something positive, like gratitude?
• If regret was an animal, what animal do you think it would be? Why?
• Have you ever regretted writing something down?

Looking for more?

We provide writing prompts on a variety of subjects for our writers and readers of all ages. You might also like to try our prompts about fear , love , or art …

Our free resources are for teachers, students, and everyone in between!

If you have any suggestions or ideas for us, or would like to leave a comment or ask a question, please reach out to us. We would love to hear from you!

The decision I regret

I remember it like it was yesterday even though it was three years ago. It was my fault; nobody forced me to do it, but I still regret it until this day.

I first met Daniel in 2010. I had just moved to a new school and had no friends. Other kids were teasing me and only Daniel stood up for me. Other kids were scared of him but I wanted to be just like him. I started following him around and a few weeks later we became friends. He was a grade ahead of me but the next year we were in the same grade. He taught me how to steal. It started small like stealing pens and teachers’ money and possessions, but then it went too far.

It was the 26th of April 2013. We had decided to bunk class that day and go to our spot behind the school. Daniel said that we had to up our game; that we can do better than stealing money and phones. I agreed and we decided to hijack a car. We decided to do it after school.

We went to Vincent that day and waited in a hidden corner. We wait for hours before a car finally parked. It was a black Mercedes Benz C-class with a woman inside. We went up to the car and I knocked on the window. When I got her attention, Daniel opened the door on the opposite side and pulled her out. She tried to call for help but Daniel put a knife next to her back and held her mouth.

He pushed her down on the ground and stole her bag, and then we got into the car and drove off. Two days later, we went to Daniel’s cousin, who is a corny car dealer, and sold the car for R10 000. We shared the money and Daniel got the bigger share. I was feeling very guilty and we decided not to do it again. I thought that was the end of our problem but it was just the beginning.

On the 23rd of December 2013 we finished our final exams and were hoping to see our names in the newspaper the next year. I went to Daniels’ house to tell him that I was travelling to Cape Town for Christmas and will not be back till after the New Year. We talked about what we were going to do in the next year and that’s when I got a call from my sister. She said that the police were at my house with a sketch of our faces. She said they were looking for us and were coming to Daniel’s house now.

We were shocked and very scared.

Later that day we were arrested for hijacking. We were taken to a police cell. Our parents were very disappointed in us. They could not afford our bail so we stayed in the police cell. I was very scared, but Daniel said that I must keep it together and deny, deny, deny. We stuck to our story for six months and then the police decided to put us in separate cells to try and break our spirits.

Daniel got into a fight in the other cell and was murdered. I was so heartbroken that I told the police everything. They sentenced me to 5 years in prison.

I have been in prison for 2 years now. I wrote this note to you my fellow brothers, so you will not follow in my footsteps and know that having bad friends turns you into a bad person.

Tell us: Do you agree with the narrator that having bad friends turns you into a bad person?

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2072 Describe a wrong decision you regret making. You should say: What the decision wasWhat the situation wasWhy you made the decisionAnd explain why you think it was the wrong decision. v.1

Ielts essay 2072 describe a wrong decision you regret making. you should say: what the decision waswhat the situation waswhy you made the decisionand explain why you think it was the wrong decision. v. 1.

• Structure your answers in logical paragraphs
• ? One main idea per paragraph
• Include an introduction and conclusion
• Support main points with an explanation and then an example
• Use cohesive linking words accurately and appropriately
• Vary your linking phrases using synonyms
• Try to vary your vocabulary using accurate synonyms
• Use less common question specific words that accurately convey meaning
• Check your work for spelling and word formation mistakes
• Use a variety of complex and simple sentences
• Check your writing for errors
• Answer all parts of the question
• ? Present relevant ideas
• Fully explain these ideas
• Support ideas with relevant, specific examples
• ? Currently is not available
• Meet the criteria
• Doesn't meet the criteria
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