Regret and Other Emotions Related to Decision-Making: Antecedents, Appraisals, and Phenomenological Aspects

Objectives: The mainstream position on regret in psychological literature is that its necessary conditions are agency and responsibility, that is, to choose freely but badly. Without free choice, other emotions, such as disappointment, are deemed to be elicited when the outcome is worse than expected. In two experiments, we tested the opposite hypothesis that being forced by external circumstances to choose an option inconsistent with one’s own intentions is an important source of regret and a core component of its phenomenology, regardless of the positivity/negativity of the post-decision outcome. Along with regret, four post-decision emotions – anger toward oneself, disappointment, anger toward circumstances, and satisfaction – were investigated to examine their analogies and differences to regret with regard to antecedents, appraisals, and phenomenological aspects.Methods: Through the scenario methodology, we manipulated three variables: choice (free/forced), outcome (positive/negative), and time (short/long time after decision-making). Moreover, we investigated whether responsibility, decision justifiability, and some phenomenological aspects (self-attribution, other attribution, and contentment) mediated the effect exerted by choice, singularly or in interaction with outcome and time, on the five emotions. Each study was conducted with 336 participants, aged 18–60.Results: The results of both studies were similar and supported our hypothesis. In particular, regret elicited by forced choice was always high, regardless of the valence of outcome, whereas free choice elicited regret was high only with a negative outcome. Moreover, regret was unaffected by responsibility and decision justifiability, whereas it was affected by the three phenomenological dimensions.Conclusion: Our results suggest that (1) the prevailing theory of regret is too binding, since it posits as necessary some requirements which are not; (2) the antecedents and phenomenology of regret are broader than it is generally believed; (3) decision-making produces a complex emotional constellation, where the different emotions, singularly and/or in combination, constitute the affective responses to the different aspects of decision-making.

What Should We Believe About Belief?

This chapter aims to set the scene. First, it sets out why we should about beliefs, and about beliefs. To this end, it surveys some of the rich philosophical and psychological literature on how beliefs are acquired and updated. Second, it aims to show that the existing literature, illuminating though it is, doesn’t adequately explain how and why we come to believe what we do and act as we do. Against philosophers and cognitive scientists who argue that beliefs matter less than we might think, or that people have more accurate beliefs than they sometimes let on, the chapter argues that people’s beliefs matter for their behavior and that bad beliefs are an important phenomenon. It then goes on to review explanations of bad belief stemming from or inspired by dual process accounts of human reasoning. It argues that these accounts face difficulties significant enough to warrant developing an alternative account of belief formation.

Why most psychological research findings are not even wrong

Psychology’s replication crisis is typically conceptualised as the insight that the published literature contains a worrying amount of unreplicable, false-positive findings. At the same time, meta-scientific attempts to assess the crisis in more detail have reported substantial difficulties to identify unambiguous definitions of the scientific claims in published articles and to determine how they are connected to the presented evidence. I argue that most claims in the literature are so critically underspecified that attempts to empirically evaluate them are doomed to failure — they are not even wrong. Meta-scientists should beware of the flawed assumption that the psychological literature is a collection of well-defined claims. To move beyond the crisis, psychologists must reconsider and rebuild the conceptual basis of their hypotheses before trying to test them.

Art Museums as Institutions for Flourishing

Visiting art museums is a common activity that a wide variety of people choose to engage in for many reasons. Increasingly, communities, nations, and societies are turning to art museums as institutions to contribute to flourishing (i.e., reducing ill-being factors, such as depression, and increasing well-being factors, such as feelings of belonging). In this paper, we review the existing psychological literature examining art museum visitation and museum program participation and their associations with flourishing-related outcomes. The literature suggests art museum visitation is associated with reductions in ill-being outcomes and increases in well-being outcomes. Additionally, programs targeting flourishing outcomes in clinical or at-risk populations (e.g., people living with dementia, older adults) show benefits to participants, with visits to art museums being socially prescribed across the globe to address a variety of ill-being conditions. Implications for existing knowledge and avenues for future research are discussed.

Envy

Envy is a prevalent emotional response to comparisons individuals make with superior others. In this article, the authors review the psychological literature on envy and discuss the relevance of envy to competitive contexts, positing a bidirectional relationship between envy and competition. The authors begin by presenting the various conceptualizations of envy, emphasizing the widely accepted notion that envy can entail distinct consequences—pulling down the envied target (i.e., malicious or destructive consequences) versus self-improvement (i.e., benign or constructive consequences). In the remaining parts of the article, the authors provide an elaborate discussion of the malicious (destructive) and benign (constructive) consequences of envy in terms of cognitions, intentions, behaviors, and wellbeing. The authors proceed by discussing the determinants of these types of envy consequences, categorized into factors related to the situation, factors related to the superior envied target, and characteristics of the envious individual. Finally, the authors discuss interventions that may reduce the destructive consequences of envy among competitors.

“It’s Not in Your Head”: Gaslighting, ‘Splaining, Victim Blaming, and Other Harmful Reactions to Microaggressions

Secondary microaggressions refer to the ways in which people of historically dominant groups negate the realities of people of marginalized groups. Gaslighting describes the act of manipulating others to doubt themselves or question their own sanity; people confronted for committing microaggressions deny the existence of their biases, often convincing the targets of microaggressions to question their own perceptions. ‘Splaining (derived from mansplaining/Whitesplaining) is an act in which a person of a dominant group speaks for or provides rationale to people of marginalized groups about topics related to oppression or inequity. Victim blaming refers to assigning fault to people who experience violence or wrongdoing and is used as a tool to discredit people of marginalized groups who speak out against microaggressions or any injustices. Finally, abandonment and neglect refer to a bystander’s failure to address or acknowledge microaggressions. Although these terms are commonly known among marginalized communities (and frequently used in popular media), there is a dearth in academic literature that substantiates these phenomena and relates them to microaggressions. The purpose of this article is to review these concepts in the psychological literature and to demonstrate the psychological harm caused by these behaviors on interpersonal and systemic levels.

Interpersonal Chemistry: What Is It, How Does It Emerge, and How Does It Operate?

Although chemistry is a well-known, sought-after interpersonal phenomenon, it has remained relatively unexplored in the psychological literature. The purpose of this article is to begin articulating a theoretically grounded and precise definition of interpersonal chemistry. To that end, we propose a conceptual model of interpersonal chemistry centered around the notion that when two or more individuals experience chemistry with one another, they experience their interaction as something more than the sum of their separate contributions. Our model stipulates that chemistry encompasses both behavior (i.e., what chemistry “looks like”) and its perception (i.e., what it “feels like”). The behavior involves interaction sequences in which synchronicity is high and in which people’s goals are expressed and responded to in supportive and encouraging ways. The perception of chemistry includes cognitive (i.e., perception of shared identity), affective (i.e., positive affect and attraction), and behavioral (i.e., perceived goal-relevant coordination) components. We review existing research on chemistry as well as supporting evidence from relevant topics (e.g., attraction, similarity, perceived partner responsiveness, synchrony) that inform and support this model. We hope that this conceptual model stimulates research to identify the circumstances in which chemistry arises and the processes by which it affects individuals, their interactions, and their relationships.

Diversity in Primate External Eye Morphology: Previously Undescribed Traits and Their Potential Adaptive Value

Comparative examinations of external eye morphology in primates initially focused on communicative functions of the eye. Subsequent work has failed to find consistent associations between specific eye morphologies and communicative functions. In this article, we review the field of primate external eye morphology and inspect publicly available and unpublished photographs. We identify and describe five commonly occurring traits that have not received attention so far. We cross-examined the clinical and psychological literature to propose potential adaptive functions. These potential adaptive functions include communicative functions, but also photoregulatory functions and photoprotective functions.

Australian and Italian Psychologists’ View of Replication

Solutions to the crisis in confidence in the psychological literature have been proposed in many recent articles, including increased publication of replication studies, a solution that requires engagement by the psychology research community. We surveyed Australian and Italian academic research psychologists about the meaning and role of replication in psychology. When asked what they consider to be a replication study, nearly all participants (98% of Australians and 96% of Italians) selected options that correspond to a direct replication. Only 14% of Australians and 8% of Italians selected any options that included changing the experimental method. Majorities of psychologists from both countries agreed that replications are very important, that more replications should be done, that more resources should be allocated to them, and that they should be published more often. Majorities of psychologists from both countries reported that they or their students sometimes or often replicate studies, yet they also reported having no replication studies published in the prior 5 years. When asked to estimate the percentage of published studies in psychology that are replications, both Australians (with a median estimate of 13%) and Italians (with a median estimate of 20%) substantially overestimated the actual rate. When asked what constitute the main obstacles to replications, difficulty publishing replications was the most frequently cited obstacle, coupled with the high value given to innovative or novel research and the low value given to replication studies.

Yogic Tradition and Well-being

This paper delineates the concept of well-being in modern psychological literature, the variety of pathways studied and its relationship with meaning and spirituality. It further discusses the cultural criticism of modern study of well-being and makes a case for insights from non-western cultures to be included in the mainstream literature. It further discusses the various types of happiness as well as pathways towards them, as discussed in the Indian tradition. These ideas have been substantiated by empirical research and some of the results have been presented in this chapter. It further presents a yogic psycho-spiritual model, based on thematic analysis of core yogic texts, which may be utilized in future for well-being interventions.