Regret and Decision-Making: A Developmental Perspective

McCormack, Teresa; Feeney, Aidan; Beck, Sarah R.

doi:10.1177/0963721420917688

Cited by 33 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…The ability to anticipate emotions (e.g. regret over choices made for oneself) has been found to develop later than their expression [ 85 , 86 ]. In addition, children's choice to reject advantageous inequity is, in part, strategically motivated by a desire to appear concerned with fairness towards observers—especially peers who would be disadvantaged by inequity ([ 87 , 88 ]; see also [ 89 ]).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The ontogeny of children's social emotions in response to (un)fairness

et al. 2022

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Humans have a deeply rooted sense of fairness, but its emotional foundation in early ontogeny remains poorly understood. Here, we asked if and when 4- to 10-year-old children show negative social emotions, such as shame or guilt, in response to advantageous unfairness expressed through a lowered body posture (measured using a Kinect depth sensor imaging camera). We found that older, but not younger children, showed more negative emotions, i.e. a reduced upper body posture, after unintentionally disadvantaging a peer on (4,1) trials than in response to fair (1,1) outcomes between themselves and others. Younger children, in contrast, expressed more negative emotions in response to the fair (1,1) split than in response to advantageous inequity. No systematic pattern of children's emotional responses was found in a non-social context, in which children divided resources between themselves and a non-social container. Supporting individual difference analyses showed that older children in the social context expressed negative emotions in response to advantageous inequity without directly acting on this negative emotional response by rejecting an advantageously unfair offer proposed by an experimenter at the end of the study. These findings shed new light on the emotional foundation of the human sense of fairness and suggest that children's negative emotional response to advantageous unfairness developmentally precedes their rejection of advantageously unfair resource distributions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The ontogeny of children's social emotions in response to (un)fairness

et al. 2022

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“…This seems unlikely given evidence that children can by age 5 anticipate future events (Atance, 2015) and accurately report that “today” precedes “next week,” which precedes “next year” (Tillman et al, 2017). At the same time, children’s temporal cognition (e.g., Atance, 2015; McCormack, 2015; McCormack & Hoerl, 2017; Tillman et al, 2017) and experiences of related emotions (e.g., “regret”; McCormack et al, 2020) continue to develop over early childhood, and these developments may underlie shifts in children’s thinking about emotional injury. An interesting related question is whether duration of harm may be more important to some children’s reasoning than others’.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“There are no band-aids for emotions”: The development of thinking about emotional harm.

Heck¹,

Bregant²,

Kinzler³

2021

Developmental Psychology

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An understanding of harm is central to social and cognitive development, but harm largely has been conceptualized as physical damage or injury. Less research focuses on children's judgments of harm to others' internal well-being (emotional harms). We asked 5-10-year-old children (N = 456, 50% girls, 50% boys; primarily tested in Central New York, with socioeconomic diversity, but limited racial/ethnic or linguistic diversity) to compare emotional and physical harms. In Experiment 1, children compared simple harms (intended and completed) and then scenarios in which the perpetrator's intention did not match the outcome (intended emotional harm, but caused physical harm, or vice-versa). Assessments of the severity of emotional (versus physical) harm increased with age and depended on the perpetrator's intentions. In Experiment 2, children saw emotional and physical harms that were: Simple (intended and completed); Incomplete (intended, but not completed); or Accidental (not intended, but completed). Children evaluated physical and emotional harms in isolation and then compared the two. Judgments of the relative severity of emotional harm increased with age, but only when intentions and outcomes were both present. This reflected an increase with age in children's perceptions that emotional harm was hurtful, whereas perceptions of physical harm were relatively stable across development. With age, children also increasingly associated emotional harms with longer-term impacts (being remembered and reoccurring). These findings suggest reasoning about the severity, underlying intentions, and duration of emotional harm shifts with age. The results hold implications for moral development, law and psychology, and emotional-harm-related interventions including those addressing bullying.

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“…It also enables retrospective learning about counterfactual actions and consequences, as when we imagine what might have happened had we pursued an alternative course of action in the past [73,74]. Such vicarious learning can be especially potent when the imagined consequences are emotionally charged [75], as in the experience of regret when comparing a sub-optimal past choice to a superior but counterfactual past choice [76]. Here, Gautam et al .…”

Section: Ultimate Questions: Functions and Phylogenymentioning

confidence: 99%

Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny

Redshaw

Ganea

2022

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Humans possess the remarkable capacity to imagine possible worlds and to demarcate possibilities and impossibilities in reasoning. We can think about what might happen in the future and consider what the present would look like had the past turned out differently. We reason about cause and effect, weigh up alternative courses of action and regret our mistakes. In this theme issue, leading experts from across the life sciences provide ground-breaking insights into the proximate questions of how thinking about possibilities works and develops, and the ultimate questions of its adaptive functions and evolutionary history. Together, the contributions delineate neurophysiological, cognitive and social mechanisms involved in mentally simulating possible states of reality; and point to conceptual changes in the understanding of singular and multiple possibilities during human development. The contributions also demonstrate how thinking about possibilities can augment learning, decision-making and judgement, and highlight aspects of the capacity that appear to be shared with non-human animals and aspects that may be uniquely human. Throughout the issue, it becomes clear that many developmental milestones achieved during childhood, and many of the most significant evolutionary and cultural triumphs of the human species, can only be understood with reference to increasingly complex reasoning about possibilities. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny’.

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Regret and Decision-Making: A Developmental Perspective

Cited by 33 publications

References 29 publications

The ontogeny of children's social emotions in response to (un)fairness

The ontogeny of children's social emotions in response to (un)fairness

“There are no band-aids for emotions”: The development of thinking about emotional harm.

Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny

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