Abstract:

As a negative, painful, and self-blaming emotion, regret arises from upward counterfactual thinking—the belief that a better outcome could have been achieved had a different choice been made. Regret is detrimental to mental health and serves as a significant risk factor for the onset of mental health disorders, such as depression. Furthermore, individuals who experience regret often exhibit a tendency toward regret aversion, which can lead to biased decision-making. Given its broad implications, research on regret is crucial for understanding how to promote mental well-being and mitigate decision-making biases. Consequently, this area of research has garnered extensive attention from scholars across various disciplines, including psychology, management, economics, and artificial intelligence.

Previous studies have employed tasks such as the wheel of fortune task, the devil task, the perceptual decision task, and the electric shock decision task to induce regret. These paradigms typically present participants with multiple options differing in reward or punishment, which elicits counterfactual thinking and subsequent regret. The action effect of regret, the temporal pattern of the experience of regret, and decision justification theory collectively provide a theoretical framework for understanding the factors influencing regret. Expanding on this foundation, the theory of regret regulation proposes strategies for mitigating regret. Furthermore, research has demonstrated that regret involves multiple cognitive and affective processes, including value assessment, reward processing, cognitive control, and emotional expression. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have implicated several brain regions in regret processing, such as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), ventral striatum, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), amygdala, and insula, as well as fronto-striatal functional connectivity, suggesting that these areas may constitute a neural circuit for regret. Additionally, electroencephalography (EEG) studies have identified feedback-related negativity (FRN), associated with outcome evaluation, and the P300, linked to emotional salience, as neural correlates of regret processing.

Regret is highly sensitive to situational factors, including perceived responsibility, social comparison, and adherence to advice. Research has shown that cognitive reappraisal, attentional deployment, anticipation, and neural modulation techniques can effectively mitigate regret. For instance, attentional deployment not only regulates immediate feelings of regret but also, when trained, induces lasting intervention effects that reduce subsequent regret. Prefrontal cortex and alpha oscillation play a key role in this process. Anticipation, meanwhile, enables individuals to psychologically prepare for potential poor decision outcomes, facilitating proactive regret regulation. This mechanism is linked to activation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC). Additionally, non-invasive neuromodulation techniques, such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), applied to regions like the OFC or dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) have demonstrated efficacy in modulating regret. However, empirical findings in this domain remain inconsistent.

In order to deepen and enrich this research, future studies could explore the following aspects. First, intensive longitudinal designs could be employed to examine the trajectory of regret fluctuations and the intervention effects following the implementation of regulation strategies in daily life, which would provide valuable insights for managing regret and supporting individual mental health in naturalistic settings. Second, research could investigate the characteristics of information transmission (neural oscillation transfer) between different brain regions within the regret-related neural circuits, as well as the dynamic changes in neural oscillation transfer during regret regulation, thereby contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying regret and its regulation. Building on this foundation, personalized stimulation frequencies could be applied to key brain regions involved in regret processing by combining electroencephalography with rhythmic transcranial magnetic stimulation, establishing causal evidence linking neural signal modifications to regret intervention outcomes. Further exploration of these critical aspects through empirical investigation may significantly improve decision-making processes across various domains while simultaneously promoting long-term psychological health and well-being.

Key words: regret, regret regulation, neural mechanism, neural modulation