When people sit back and take stock of their lives, do they regret the things that failed, such as a romance that foundered, the wrong career path chosen, bad grades in school? Or do they most regret what they failed to try?
A small but growing body of research points to inaction failing to seize the day as the leading cause of regret in people's lives over the long term. These findings are painting a new portrait of regret, an emotion proving to be far more complex than once thought.
Regret is a "more or less painful emotional state of feeling sorry for misfortunes, limitations, losses, transgressions, shortcomings or mistakes," says University of Michigan psychologist Janet Landman, author of several studies and a book on regret.
"As a culture, we are so afraid of regret, so allergic to it, often we don't even want to talk about it," Landman says. "The fear is that it will pull us down the slippery slope of depression and despair."
But psychologists say that regret is an inevitable fact of life.
"In today's world, in which people arguably exercise more choice than ever before in human history, it is exceedingly difficult to choose so consistently well that regret is avoided entirely," say Cornell University psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec.
Regret involves two distinct types of emotion, what psychologists call "hot" and "wistful". Hot regret is quick anger felt after discovering that you have made a mistake, like denting your car, accidentally dropping a prized vase and seeing it smash into a thousand pieces, or buying a share that suddenly plummets in price. This is when you want to kick yourself, and it is associated with a short-term perspective.
Wistful regret, on the other hand, comes from having a longer range perspective. It is a bittersweet feeling that life might have been better or different if only certain actions had been taken. Typically, it means something that people should have done but didn't do. That might mean having the courage to follow a different career, gambling on starting a new business or pursuing what appears to be a risky romance.
Psychologists have focused on hot regret as the type most common to people's experience. But a growing body of research suggests that wistful regret may figure more prominently in people's lives over the long term.
Asked to describe their biggest regrets, participants most often cited things they failed to do. People said such things as "I wish I had been more serious in college", "I regret that I never pursued my interest in dance", "I should have spent more time with my children".
In a study of 77 participants, the researchers found that failure to seize the moment was cited by a 2 to 1 ratio over other types of regret.
The group, which included retired professors, nursing-home residents, undergraduates and staff members at Cornell University, listed more than 200 missed educational opportunities, romances and career paths, as well as failing to spend more time with relatives, pursue a special interest or take a chance.
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"As troubling as regrettable actions might be initially, when people look back on their lives, it seems to be their regrettable failures to act that stand out and cause most grief," Gilovich and Medvec conclude.
Studies suggest that regrets about education are overwhelmingly the biggest. "Not getting enough education, or not taking it seriously enough, is a common regret even among highly educated people," says Janet Landman.
Tied for a distant second place are regrets about work or love. People talk about having gotten into the wrong occupation, marrying too young, or that they wish their parents had never divorced, or there were fewer conflicts in their family, or that their children had turned out better.
Many people also express regrets about themselves. They may wish they had been more disciplined or more assertive or had taken more risks. The best example of this kind of regret is the lament of one of Woody Allen's (American comic actor and director) characters, "I have only one regret, and that is that I am not someone else."
What people don't regret, however, are events that seem to be beyond their control. Personal responsibility is central to the experience of regret, according to Gilovich and Medvec. "People might
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bemoan or curse their bad fate, but they rarely regret it in the sense that the term is typically understood."
Their studies found that older people expressed slightly more regrets than did young people. There is no solid evidence that regret increases as life goes on but regrets are likely to change throughout life.
For example, according to Janet Landman, young women are more likely to report family oriented regrets than young men. But by middle age men are more likely than women to regret not spending enough time with their families.
And what do middle-aged women regret? Marrying too early and not getting enough education.
Alan Stanton, Susan Morris Fast Track to ..
Longman, 1999
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