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| Research article summary (published 30 Jul 2009): |
The relationship between counterfactual thinking and emotional reactions to event outcomes: does one account fit all?
Full Abstract
By enabling a comparison between what is and what might have been, counterfactual thoughts amplify our emotional responses to bad outcomes. Well-known demonstrations such as the action effect (the tendency to attribute most regret to a character whose actions brought about a bad outcome) and the temporal order effect (the tendency to undo the last in a series of events leading up to a bad outcome) are often explained in this way. An important difference between these effects is that outcomes are due to decisions in the action effect, whereas in the temporal order effect outcomes are achieved by chance. In Experiment 1, we showed that imposing time pressure leads to a significant reduction in the action but not in the temporal order effect. In Experiment 2, we found that asking participants to evaluate the protagonists ("who ought to feel worse?") led to a significant reduction in the temporal order but not in the action effect. The results suggest that the action and temporal order effects require different explanations and are consistent with other work that suggests that when decisions lead to bad outcomes a comparison of decision quality is an important determinant of the emotional response attributed to the protagonists. The stimulus materials used in our experiments may be downloaded from pbr.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.
Author information
Author/s: Atkinson, Lisa (L); Bell, David (D); Feeney, Aidan (A);
Affiliation: Durham University, Durham, England.
Journal and publication information
Publication Type: Journal Article
Journal: Psychonomic bulletin & review (Psychon Bull Rev), published in United States. (Language: eng)
Reference: 2009-Aug; vol 16 (issue 4) : pp 724-8
Dates: Created 2009/08/03; Completed 2009/10/13;
PMID: 19648459, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 10/13/2009, IMS Date: )
Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.
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