Regret Can Influence Decision-Making Behavior In Both Mice and Children

    Regret is an emotion that every person and animal has to go through and it is typically associated with sadness. Regret can be defined as a feeling of sorrow in response to losing something, disappointment, and doing something that you wish you did not. In addition, regret can be seen in influencing the behaviors of both animals and humans on a regular basis in order to make sure that both humans and animals in their daily lives make decisions that will be best suited to their needs.  

  

     Furthermore, as seen in a variety of studies, regret can be studied within the different study populations which can range from humans to animals through different learning tasks. One specific example of a study that studies regret is a research article done by Brian Sweis et al. called “Mice Learn to Avoid Regret”. In the article, the team performs an experiment that is broken up into stages with food-restricted mice in order to fully delve into the idea of whether animals can learn from regret and use that same feeling of regret to avoid making the same mistake in the future. In the study, the researchers trained the food-restricted mice over a series of days to go to each of the four feeding sites and decide whether they wanted to wait for the pellet or if they wanted to leave and go to the next feeding site and the mice were given a total of one hour to get the pellets. In addition, within each of the four feeding sites, each site had a unique spatial cue that alerted the mice to how long they would have to wait in the wait zone until they were given their pellet and each feeding site offered different flavored pellets such as banana, grape, chocolate and plain. After conducting their experiment, the researchers found that after mice felt regret due to accepting an offer that was too expensive for their limited time budget, the mice learned to take offers that were relatively inexpensive.

  

     In relation to the experiment conducted by Brian Sweis et al, another experiment that studied regret in children was a study done by Teresa McCormack et al. called “Experiencing Regret About A Choice Helps Children to Learn Delay Gratification”. In the study, the team conducted two experiments, where one of the experiment was to test whether the children felt regret and they decided to change their behavior from day 1 to day 2 and the second experiment was to test if intelligence and preferences for the treats were causing the children to change their behavior. In the first experiment, there were about 78 children who were 6 to 7 years old, and the researchers had two boxes in front of the children where one of the boxes contained two pieces of candy and the other box had four pieces of candy. The researchers told the children that they could either wait for the short delay which was about 30 seconds or they could wait for the long delay which was about 600 seconds but the researchers did not tell the children what the prizes were inside each box. At the end of the study, they found that children who decided to wait only for the short delay reported feeling sadder after seeing the bigger prize in the long delay box compared to the children who waited for the long delay reported feeling happier after seeing the small prize in the short delay box. Furthermore, when the researchers conducted the same study the following day, the children who decided to wait for the short delay box decided to wait for the long delay box due to experiencing regret on day one. In addition, the children who decided to wait for the long delay box on day one also decided to wait for the long delay on day two. Additionally, the results found in experiment two were the same as the results seen in experiment one where the children who experienced regret by choosing the short delay box on day one decided to change their decision and choose the long delay box on day two.  

    

    Overall, in both of these studies, it can be seen that regret plays a huge role in how one behaves and it can also influence animals as well as children to change their behavior in order to optimize their chances of getting either the pellet or the treats.

 References: 

McCormack, Teresa et al. (2019). Experiencing Regret About A Choice Helps Children Learn to Delay Gratification. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2018.11.005 

Sweis. M., Brian et al. (2018). Mice Learn to Avoid Regret. PLoS Biology 16 (6): e2005853. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2005853