Few emotions are as nagging as regret—the mourning and melancholy that comes from fearing you picked the wrong mate, pursued the wrong career, or ended a marriage that you maybe could have saved. Over the course of a lifetime, there are a lot of such hinge points. It would seem to follow that the longer you live, the more regrets you’ll have. But a new study published in the journal Emotion finds that the opposite is actually true: older people have fewer regrets than younger people—and handle them better when they do.
“In general, older people seem to pull back more and not to think as much about the regrets or what they should do about them,” says lead author Julia Nolte, assistant professor in the department of psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. “We were interested in this difference in the psychological aging process and what it does to us [over] time.”
To conduct their study, Nolte and her colleagues asked 90 people ages 21 to 89 to list five recent regrets and five others that occurred earlier in their lives. They were then asked to categorize these regrets as “hot,” “wistful,” or “despairing.” Under the “hot” label were feelings of anger, embarrassment, and irritation. “Wistful” feelings were nostalgic, sentimental, and contemplative. “Despairing” ones were desperation and sorrow. People then ranked how acutely they felt all of those emotions. Finally, the researchers asked people to describe strategies they might use to reverse or correct regretted actions—or at least learn to accept what had happened.
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“We looked at how people cope with regret,” says Nolte, “how they were currently trying to resolve those feelings and what they were thinking about for the future. If they had, say, health-related regrets or a work-related regret, and they were thinking, ‘How can I affect what happens in the future? Can I prevent it?’”
The results were striking. Overall, older people weren’t nearly as affected by recent regrets as younger people. And while both old and young reported similar levels of long-term regrets, the older people had less anger, irritation, and embarrassment over what had gone wrong.
“Older adults have fewer hot emotions,” says Nolte. “This was true for both recent and long-term regrets.”
The researchers also looked at whether people tended to regret things they had done—called regrets of commission—vs. things they had not done, or regrets of omission. The former kind were based on active choices, like moving to a different city or choosing a spouse. The latter kind occurred when they didn’t take an action they otherwise could have, like passing up a lucrative investment or not going to college. Young people had more regrets about things they did, while older people had more regrets about things they did not do.
As for coping, the researchers found that younger people were much more likely to have plans to correct or ameliorate their regret than older people. Regrets, the seniors seem to believe, are just something they must learn to live with. “[Seniors] were using less psychological repair work,” says Nolte.
The researchers did not reach any conclusions about what accounts for the disparity. Seniors may simply be more willing to accept life as it, as opposed to some optimal version. Nolte also suggests that there might be a generational difference at work. Boomers, say, may have had a range of cultural experiences that lead to a more accepting approach to regret than Millennials or Gen Z.
“There might be something in the period of time that people were born,” Nolte says. “That would mean that we wouldn’t necessarily see the same results if we did this study again in 50 years’ time.”
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