You 2.0: Regrets, I Have a Few...

We all have regrets. By some estimates, regret is one of the most common emotions we experience in our daily lives. In the final episode of our You 2.0 series, we bring you a favorite interview with Amy Summerville, the former head of the Regret Lab at Miami University in Ohio. After years of studying this emotion, she says she's learned something that may seem counterintuitive: regret doesn't always have to be a negative force in our lives.

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Regrets, I Have A Few

/ September 12, 2017

We all have regrets. By some estimates, regret is one of the most common emotions experienced in our daily lives. This week we’ll hear listeners’ stories of regret, and talk with psychology professor Amy Summerville. She runs the Regret Lab at Miami University in Ohio. Summerville says regret doesn’t always have to be a negative force in our lives. Sometimes, it can be a hopeful emotion.

Transcript

*The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode.
Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.*

SHANKAR VEDANTAM, HOST: This is HIDDEN BRAIN. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Whether or not you believe in them, you probably have ghosts that haunt you - not something sinister, but something that you just can't get rid of. These ghosts are relentless, and they will make you rehash details from your past over and over again.UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Hi there, Shankar and friends.UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Hello, Shankar.UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Hi.UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: Hi.UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: I was calling about...UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Old Blue Eyes sang it - regrets, I've had a few. So I won't list all of them.UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: My boyfriend of a year and I ended our relationship.UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: It's just looking back and thinking that I could have done better, and I didn't.UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: All these things keep popping into my head of - small things - maybe something I should have said differently or something I should have done differently in a particular conversation or on a particular event.UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #4: It makes me cringe with regret and shame.UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: I had an affair. Everyone knows it. It's not a secret, but it's a regret.UNIDENTIFIED MAN #4: My great regret is leaving Woodstock on Saturday morning.UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: I was an evangelical Christian at the time. And I remember my friends asking me if I thought they were going to Hell. And I told them that I thought they would go to Hell if they did not become Christian.UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: And it's something that's bothered me for the last 10 years.UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: I am experiencing regrets on sometimes a minute-by-minute basis.UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: And it is the biggest regret of my life, honestly.UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: That's it.UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: I hope you have a great rest of your day.UNIDENTIFIED MAN #4: Bye.VEDANTAM: Today on HIDDEN BRAIN, we're going to talk about regrets.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: Amy Summerville is a psychology professor at Miami University of Ohio. She runs the Regret Lab, where she studies how people think about the choices they made and the choices they wish they'd made. Amy, welcome to HIDDEN BRAIN.AMY SUMMERVILLE: Hi, it's great to talk to you.VEDANTAM: You know, I was fascinated when I heard that you run a regret lab. And I was fascinated because I was wondering what prompts someone to spend so much time studying regret. What drew you to the subject?SUMMERVILLE: I don't know that I have a particular deep back story about how I got regret. I actually was just generally interested in social psychology. And one of the things that then drew me to regret from that is the fact that regret is among our most common emotions. By some estimates, it's the second most common emotion mentioned in daily life and the most common negative emotion that we mention.And so this is really a pervasive part of how people experience the world around them. And as I learned more, I really started to realize that regret is actually a very hopeful emotion. It's something that is helping us learn from our mistakes and do better in the future. So it's actually, I think, a really positive thing to get to study.VEDANTAM: Amy, I'd like to structure this conversation around a couple of stories of regret. We actually reached out to listeners of HIDDEN BRAIN some time ago, and they sent in stories about some of the things they regret in life. One came from Tom Bonsaint (ph) of Arlington, Va. Here's the tape.TOM BONSAINT: I regret not taking the lead in a school play when I was in ninth grade. I was in a 9 through 12 school, and I was surprised to receive the lead as a freshman. It was somewhat of a big deal considering that freshman typically don't get those sort of roles. And rather than accept the fact that the director felt like I would be a good choice for the role, I listened to people who said that I probably couldn't handle it and therefore decided to turn the role down.Later on in life, I realized that when people present me with an opportunity like that, if they have the confidence in me being able to be successful, they're likely not putting me in that place to fail. And so since then, I feel like I've gotten a new confidence. And so when faced with a - similar situations in the current time, I've been much more likely to put my hand up and say yes.VEDANTAM: I'm wondering how common this is. Are people really good at taking what happened in the past and learning from it? What spells the difference between people who actually are behaving like Tom - taking a bad experience and saying I'm actually going to use it - and people who just sort of stay stuck in what that bad experience was and think about it over and over again?SUMMERVILLE: So I think the thing that really characterizes it is less about necessarily what kind of person you are but rather the way that you're experiencing these thoughts. So there's something called rumination, which actually comes literally from bovine digestion - the idea of how cows vomit back up things, chew them over, swallow them back down and so on and so forth. And in terms of our thoughts, it's actually this idea of the same kind of process - that rumination is having thoughts sort of spring unwanted to mind.And we're chewing them over without actually getting anything new out of them. They're just repeatedly, intrusively becoming sort of part of our mental landscape. And what we found is that people who have ruminative regrets - so that they're both having this regret, but also having it be something that's intrusive and repeated - tend to be people who are also experiencing the most negative outcomes, so are more likely to have clinical depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms, things like that.VEDANTAM: There are some regrets you can learn from, like Tom's story about trying out for the school play. But other regrets feel harder to overcome. I asked Amy Summerville about this, and I played her the story from Catherine Wigginton-Green (ph), a listener from Washington, D.C.CATHERINE WIGGINTON-GREEN: My main regret, what popped into my mind when I heard this on the podcast, was regretting not stopping and seeing my estranged father. He's been estranged from our family for quite a while, and I had not seen him or spoken with him in a very long time - his choice. And I was driving along Rock Creek Parkway with my boyfriend at the time, who is now my husband. And as we were driving up Rock Creek Parkway, I looked to my right and saw him and the woman he married walking arm in arm.And I saw him, and I told my husband to pull over immediately without thinking. And when we stopped the car, I started to unbuckle my seat belt. And then I stopped and paused for a moment and realized I had no idea what I was going to do or what I was going to say. So I chickened out and buckled my seat belt back and told my husband to keep driving. And then I burst into tears. And I realized that that was probably the last time I was going to see him, and that was my only chance to talk to him again. So I still regret that.VEDANTAM: There's something really poignant about that story, Amy, because in this case, it doesn't sound as if the regret has the potential for learning. She says that she feels that the door was closed in terms of her ability to reconnect with her father. And she comes back to this memory over and over agai

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