Missed opportunities: Psychological ramifications of counterfactual thought in midlife women

Abstract

Counterfactual thinking entails the process of imagining alternatives to reality--what might have been. The present study examines the frequency, content, and emotional and cognitive concomitants of counterfactual thinking about past missed opportunities in midlife women. At age 43, nearly two-thirds of the sample of educated adult women reported having missed certain opportunities at some time in their lives. Most of the counterfactual thoughts concerned missed opportunities for greater challenge in work. Emotional distress at age 33 did not predict later counterfactual thought. Instead, counterfactual thinking at age 43 was associated with concurrent emotional distress. However, acknowledging counterfactual thinking about the past was also associated with envisioning ways to change things for the better in the future. This suggests the possibility that the negative appraisal often entailed in counterfactual thinking may be associated with emotional distress in the short run but with motivational benefits in the long run, at least for middle-aged women.KEY WORDS: Counterfactual thought; emotion; midlife women; motivation; work.I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth--I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.Henry James INTRODUCTIONPossible but unactualized states, or alternatives to reality, are called counterfactuals, thinking about counterfactuals is called counterfactual thought (Goodman, 1973;Kahneman & Tversky, 1982a;Kripke, 1980;Lewis, 1973 (Hampshire, 1983). In the present study, we examined the frequency and content of counterfactual thoughts about missed opportunities in midlife women. We also examined the relationship between counterfactual thought and past and present emotional distress as well as the relationship between counterfactual thoughts about the past and the future. Although a relatively new area for systematic empirical inquiry, counterfactual thought has already been implicated in a variety of psychological processes, including causal attribution , self-esteem (Roese & Olson, 1993), emotional reactions to life events (Davis, Lehman, Wortman, Silver, & Thompson, 1995;Gleicher et al., 1990;Kahneman & Tversky, 1982a, Landman, 1987Landman, 1995; Lehman, 87 (Macrae, 1992;Miller, Turnbull, & McFarland, 1990;Roese & Olson, 1995), and motivation (Johnson & Sherman, 1990;Markman, Gavanski, Sherman, & McMullen, 1993;Ruvolo & Markus, 1992).With the exception of the work on possible selves by Markus and Nurius (1986) as well as that on personally relevant counterfactual thought by Landman and Manis (1992) and very recently by Davis et al. (1995), virtually all the research targeting counteffactual thought to date has been carried out in the laboratory, typically employing written vignettes describing hypothetical decision makers, events, and outcomes. Therefore, many questions remain about the nature and implications of personal counterfactual thought.Markus and Nurius' (1986) notion of "possible selves," or cognitive/affecti...

How Emotion Shapes Behavior: Feedback, Anticipation, and Reflection, Rather Than Direct Causation

“…Negative emotions signal that a problem needs rectifying. Often it is too late to do anything about something bad that has already happened, but counterfactual thinking can enable the person to learn a lesson so as to avoid repeating the misfortune in the future (Landman, Vandewater, Stewart, & Malley, 1995;Markman, Gavanski, Sherman, & McMullen, 1993;Roese, 1994;Taylor & Schneider, 1989).…”

What We Regret Most... and Why

“…Finally, three studies are briefly summarized that rule out an alternative interpretation of the opportunity principle centering on framing effects. Overall, five data sets used the method of having participants select their biggest regrets from a list provided by the researchers (DeGenova, 1992; Landman & Manis, 1992, Samples 1 and 2;Landman et al, 1995); the remainder used the strategy of having participants record regrets, with independent coders subsequently assigning them to life domain categories. Also, in three of the data sets (Landman et al, 1995;Lecci et al, 1994;Wrosch & Heckhausen, 2002), the researchers restricted their measure to regrets of 1 One commonly cited paper did not appear in the meta-analysis (Metha, Kinnier, & McWhirter, 1989) because it seemed that its data were redundant to those presented in Kinnier and Metha (1989).…”

Regret as autobiographical memory

“…The Hattiangadi et al (1995) data for example show that inactions outnumbered actions by more than four to one, and that does not include a category of "indeterminate regrets" (those coded as "both" or "neither") which in the studies reported in the thesis were on average three times more likely to be general than specific. It would not be surprising to find similar patterns in surveys asking people to say what they would do if they had their lives to live over (DeGenoa, 1992;Hattiangadi et al, 1995;Kinnier & Metha, 1989;Landman & Manis, 1992;Landman et al, 1995) because as Kahneman (1995) has suggested, requests for regrets tend to elicit elaborative counterfactuals about how life might have been better, which are likely to involve big changes of a general nature. In temporal construal terms (Trope & Liberman, 2003) such requests might be interpreted as an invitation to consider personal goals at the superordinate level, which would necessarily elicit "bigger picture" construals of distant events.…”

“…These findings come from surveys and experimental studies involving both sexes, all age groups, and different methods of eliciting regret. Some studies asked people directly what they regretted in life (Gilovich & Medvec, 1994;Jokisaari, 2003) or which of life"s activities they most regretted not having pursued (Wrosch & Heckhausen, 2002), while others asked people to say how they would do things differently if they could live life over again (DeGenoa, 1992;Hattiangadi, Medvec & Gilovich, 1995;Kinnier & Metha, 1989;Landman & Manis, 1992;Landman, Vanderwater, Stewart & Malley, 1995). Lecci, Okun and Karoly, (1994) asked people about their unfulfilled goals, which were seen as proxies for regret.…”

“…As was mentioned in the introductory chapter, this bias towards action is implicit in the framing of questions in many regret surveys, which ask people to describe what they would do differently a second time around (DeGenoa, 1992;Kinnear and Metha, 1989;Stewart & Vanderwater, 1999), or to describe their missed opportunities (Landman et al, 1995) and regrets for things they regret not having done (Wrosch & Heckhausen, 2002). So far as it is possible to judge, there are no regret surveys in which participants are asked to describe what they would not do if they could live their lives again.…”