The Science Behind Regret

 As human beings we are conditioned to avoid regretful moments. Through empowering talks, songs, and social media, we are reminded again and again to live life to the fullest, to never look back and keep moving forward.

In a recent article by Lynn A. Anderson titled Regrets and Your Health, she talks about the negatives of holding on to regret. According to her study, regret causes unhealthy effects in our body both physically and mentally. The article states that holding on to regret leads to prolonged stress which has detrimental effects such as high blood pressure and compromised immune response. Anderson states that regret affects “the chemistry of our brain”. This means that when our brain processes regret, it has an undesirable effect on our health. Anderson says that the reason we feel regret is because we are unhappy with how our life is in the present. We spend time looking back which makes life unenjoyable. We miss our moments. To minimize the effects of regret, the article suggests that we find contentment in our daily lives and we focus on the here and now will shape our livelihood for the better.

Ferris Jabr’s article tilted The Rue Age: Older Adults Disengage from Regrets, Young People Fixate on Them, shows that the older we get, the less we hold on to regret. Younger adults tend to feel more regret because they have more of a chance to learn from their experience. Jabr gave the example of a twenty-year-old who was unsatisfied with their level of education. Because this person was young, the regret helped him turn their his around and make a change. The same is not the case for older men and women. If someone in their sixties held on to regret the same way that someone in their twenties did, then the older individual would most likely become depressed because there is no feasible way to make their life better. Jabr states that the research team involved in this experiment hopes to come up with a program that helps middle aged men and women direct feelings of regret to outside forces rather than putting the blame on themselves. This will help minimize depression amongst older men and women greatly.

Adam P Steiner and A David Redish’s article regarding regret and decision-making in rats talks about the chemical processes a rat’s brain goes through when feeling regret. In the article it states that humans who have damaged OFC do not experience regret. The same OFC is found to be in use by rats and other primates. In rats, the OFC is linked to decision-making “particularly in the role of…future rewards.” (995). In class, Dr. Brian Sweis explained how their lab was able to obtain their data. The setup included four different zones with four different types of food. When the rats entered the various zones, they were faced with distinct tones. The higher the pitch of the tone, the longer the wait time. Through their experiment they learned that the all four rats were more likely to wait through the delay if it was less than the threshold but if the delay was longer than the threshold, they would not wait. They learned that regret causing situations were those when the rat ended up skipping a low-cost but high-value reward. They saw that when a rat encountered a zone with a longer delay time than the threshold, the rat looked back. This was registered as the rat feeling regret for his choice.

Through this lecture and the articles regarding human regret, it is interesting to see how an emotion is felt across species. In Dr. Sweis’s talk it was clear that there is so much more to learn about the brain. Their use of rats to understand something as common as regret really shows people how humans are closely related to other mammals in our environment. Regret plays a major role in our everyday lives. Through conducting experiments and learning about brain activity of animals, we can begin to get a grasp on the inner workings of the human mind.

Works cited:

Anderson, Ph.D. Lynn A. "Regrets and Your Health." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, n.d. Web. 04 Mar. 2016.

Redish, David, Steiner, A. “Behavioral and neurophysiological correlates of regret in rat decision-making on a neuroeconomic task.” Nature Neuroscience

"The Rue Age: Older Adults Disengage from Regrets, Young People Fixate on Them." Scientific American. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 Mar. 2016.