Reality Compared With Its Alternatives: Age Differences in Judgments of Regret and Relief

Three experiments examined developmental change in children's understanding of regret and relief, two second-order emotions whose quality depends on a comparison between reality and "what might have been." In Experiment 1, participants 7 years of age and older, but not 5-year-olds, ma...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Developmental psychology 2004-09, Vol.40 (5), p.764-775
Main Authors: Guttentag, Robert, Ferrell, Jennifer
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Age
Age Differences
Age Factors
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child Development
Child psychology
Child, Preschool
Childhood Development
Children & youth
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive Development
Comprehension
Concept Formation
Decision Making
Developmental psychology
Emotional Development
Emotional Response
Emotions
Experiments
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Judgment
Male
Perceptions
Psychological Patterns
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reading
Reality
Reality Testing
Regret
Relief
Speech Perception
Understanding
Young Children
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Summary:Three experiments examined developmental change in children's understanding of regret and relief, two second-order emotions whose quality depends on a comparison between reality and "what might have been." In Experiment 1, participants 7 years of age and older, but not 5-year-olds, made regret-related emotion-response judgments that took into account a comparison of reality with its alternatives. In Experiment 2, 5-year-olds judged that an individual would feel better, rather than worse, when a counterfactual outcome was better than what actually occurred (the opposite of the pattern found with older children and adults). Experiment 3 focused on the understanding of relief. In contrast to the findings from Experiment 1, the 7-year-olds in Experiment 3 made their judgments solely on the basis of what actually occurred.
ISSN:0012-1649
1939-0599
DOI:10.1037/0012-1649.40.5.764