Regret and adaptive decision making in young children

Abstract

In line with the claim that regret plays a role in decision making, O'Connor, McCormack, and Feeney (Child Development, 85 (2014) 1995-2010) found that children who reported feeling sadder on discovering they had made a non-optimal choice were more likely to make a different choice the next time around. We examined two issues of interpretation regarding this finding: whether the emotion measured was indeed regret and whether it was the experience of this emotion, rather than the ability to anticipate it, that affected decision making. To address the first issue, we varied the degree to which children aged 6 or 7 years were responsible for an outcome, assuming that responsibility is a necessary condition for regret. The second issue was addressed by examining whether children could accurately anticipate that they would feel worse on discovering they had made a non-optimal choice. Children were more likely to feel sad if they were responsible for the outcome; however, even if they were not responsible, children were more likely than chance to report feeling sadder. Moreover, across all conditions, feeling sadder was associated with making a better subsequent choice. In a separate task, we demonstrated that children of this age cannot accurately anticipate feeling sadder on discovering that they had not made the best choice. These findings suggest that although children may feel regret following a non-optimal choice, even if they were not responsible for an outcome, they may experience another negative emotion such as frustration. Experiencing either of these emotions seems to be sufficient to support better decision making.

The development of regret and relief about the outcomes of risky decisions

“…We are assuming that this question remains open even under circumstances in which participants have full responsibility for the choice that led to the outcome and full feedback has been given (see O'Connor, McCormack, Beck, & Feeney, 2015). Certainly, any explanation of children's emotions in terms of frustration needs to be more complex than assuming a simple comparison between the prize obtained and the best or worst prize available; it would need to assume that this frustration can mutate within a single trial following complete feedback (from frustration to happiness in relief trials or from happiness to frustration in regret trials).…”

How do thoughts, emotions, and decisions align? A new way to examine theory of mind during middle childhood and beyond

“…Relevant to how emotions affect coping decisions, Sayfan and Lagattuta (2009) demonstrated that children as young as 4 years of age understand that behavior choices, such as fight or flight, can be effective in reducing fear, with advances between 4 and 7 years in understanding more complex causal links between emotion and behavior (see also Bamford & Lagattuta, 2010; Harris, 1989). Children begin to report feeling regret around 6 to 9 years of age (Beck & Riggs, 2014; O’Connor, McCormack, & Feeney, 2012; Rafetseder & Perner, 2012), and this emotion aids them in making more adaptive future decisions (O’Connor, McCormack, Beck, & Feeney, 2015; O’Connor, McCormack, & Feeney, 2014). Still, children exhibit more difficulty reasoning about another’s regret than reporting their own experience of it (Weisberg & Beck, 2010), further indicating that knowledge about emotion-decision connections continues to develop through middle childhood.…”

Knowing when to hold ‘em: regret and the relation between missed opportunities and risk taking in children, adolescents and adults

“…Regret, risk and the development of decision-making By around 6 years, a substantial proportion of children, when prompted, will explicitly report feeling worse when they discover that a better outcome would have arisen had they chosen differently (O'Connor, McCormack, Beck, & Feeney, 2015;O'Connor, McCormack, & Feeney, 2012Van Duijvenvoorde, Huizenga, & Jansen, 2014), including in tasks involving risky choice (McCormack, O'Connor, Beck, & Feeney, 2016). Recent research has revealed that at this age the experience of regret following a bad decision outcome is associated with choosing differently when presented with the same choice on the next day (O'Connor et al, 2014).…”