Matarazzo Olimpia, Abbamonte Lucia, Greco Claudia, Pizzini Barbara, Nigro Giovanna
Department of Psychology, University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli", Caserta, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2021 Dec 16;12:783248. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.783248. eCollection 2021.
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. 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. 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. Our results suggest that the prevailing theory of regret is too binding, since it posits as necessary some requirements which are not; the antecedents and phenomenology of regret are broader than it is generally believed; 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.
心理学文献中关于遗憾的主流观点是，其必要条件是能动性和责任感，即自由地做出糟糕的选择。如果没有自由选择，当结果比预期更糟时，人们会产生其他情绪，比如失望。在两项实验中，我们测试了相反的假设：被外部环境迫使选择与自己意图不符的选项是遗憾的一个重要来源，也是其现象学的核心组成部分，无论决策后的结果是好是坏。除了遗憾，我们还研究了四种决策后的情绪——对自己的愤怒、失望、对环境的愤怒和满足感，以考察它们在起因、评价和现象学方面与遗憾的异同。通过情景方法，我们操纵了三个变量：选择（自由/被迫）、结果（积极/消极）和时间（决策后短时间/长时间）。此外，我们研究了责任感、决策合理性以及一些现象学方面（自我归因、他人归因和满足感）是否单独或与结果和时间相互作用，介导了选择对这五种情绪产生的影响。每项研究都有336名年龄在18至60岁之间的参与者。两项研究的结果相似，都支持了我们的假设。特别是，被迫选择引发的遗憾总是很高，无论结果的正负性如何，而自由选择引发的遗憾只有在结果为负面时才会很高。此外，遗憾不受责任感和决策合理性的影响，而受三个现象学维度的影响。我们的结果表明，关于遗憾的主流理论限制过严，因为它将一些并非必要的条件设定为必要条件；遗憾的起因和现象学比人们普遍认为的更为宽泛；决策会产生一个复杂的情绪组合，其中不同的情绪单独和/或共同构成了对决策不同方面的情感反应。
