Regret is as common an emotion as love or fear, and it can be nearly as powerful. So, in a new paper, two researchers set about trying to find out what the typical American regrets most. In telephone surveys, Neal Roese, a psychologist and professor of marketing at the School ofmanagement at Northwestern UniverSity, and Mike Morrison, a doctoral candidate in psychology at University of Illinois, asked 370 Americans, aged 19 to 103, to talk about their most notable regret. Participants were asked what the regret was, when it happened, whether it was a result of something they did or didn't do, and whether it was something that could still be fixed.
The most commonly mentioned regrets involved romance (浪漫的事) (18%)——lost loves or unfulfilled relationships. Family regrets came in second (16%), with people still feeling badly about being unkind to their brothers or sisters in childhood. Other frequently reported regrets involved career (13%), education (12%), money (10%) and parenting (9%).
Roese and Morrison's study, which is to be published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, is significant in that it surveyed a wide range of the American public, including people of all ages and socio-economic and educational backgrounds. Previous studies on regret have focused largely on college students, who predictably tend to have education-focused regrets, like wishing they had studied harder or a different major. The new survey shows that in the larger population, a person's "life circumstances accomplishments, shortcomings, situation in life- inject considerable fuel into the fires of regret," the authors write.
People with less education, for instance, were more likely to report education regrets. People with higher levels of education had the most career regrets. And those with no romantic parmer tended to hold regrets regarding love.
Broken down (分解、细分) by sex, more women (44%) than men (19%) had regrets about love and family not surprising, since women "value social relationships more than men," the authors write. In contrast, men (34%) weremore likely than women (27%) to mention work-related regrets, wishing they'd chosen a different career path, for instance, or followed their passion. Many participants also reported wishing they had worked less to spend more time with their children.
There was an even split between regrets about inaction (not doing something) and action (doing something you wish you didn't). But, like previous studies, the current research found that some regrets are more likely than others to persist over time: people tend to hang on longer to the regret of inaction; meanwhile, regrets of action tend to be more recent.