The Emergence And Development Of Regrets And Relief Among Children Aged 6-9 In Risk Decision-Making Tasks

People's thinking is not always focused on what is happening or what is going to happen,and many are thinking about what has happened in the past,and this way of thinking about the past is called Counterfactual thinking.When individuals think about the past,he or she would like to construct another more virtual and possible event results in the brain,and compares the two results to produce a special emotional experience,which we also call counterfactual emotions.Most of the research on counterfactual emotion and decision-making focuses on adults,and there are very few studies on children.Some studies have proved that regret does drive children to make better decision,but there is no clear answer to the question about the specific age of counterfactual emotion,how to influence the decision-making process of children and the influencing factors.Based on the previous literature studies,it is founded that the simple game used in the study of children's regret and relief is very different from the research paradigm of risk decision-making tasks used by teenagers and adults.This is not only inconsistent with the principle of continuity of development,but also unable to study the integration of children's and adults' counterfactual emotion from the age point of view,which is not conducive to the further exploration of researchers.Therefore,more empirical research is needed to explore the relationship between counterfactual emotion and risk decision-making in the future.Based on the research model of McCormack & O'Connor(2016),this study has prepared a simple version of risk decision-making.It is divided into two experiments to investigate whether children's regret and the development of relief and whether different emotional scoring methods affect the experimental results.The results of experiment 1 and experiment 2 show that:(1)The young group(6-7 years old)was more likely to make risky choices than the elder group(8-9 years old);(2)In experiment 1 and experiment 2,the children in middle and young group and the elder group experienced regret,and the regret emotion increased with the increase of age,while the relief emotion in experiment 1 did not show the characteristics of increasing with the increase of age,and in experiment 2,both regret emotion and relief emotion increased with the age;(3)Compared with the single score in experiment 1,the secondary emotion score in the experiment 2,regret emotion has a higher proportion in the game,and the proportion of relief emotion in the game is higher,and the difference has statistical significance.Combined with the two experimental studies,we can draw the conclusion that the younger are more likely to make risk decisions.Different emotional scoring methods have different effects on the measurement results of counterfactual emotion,and the secondary emotional scoring method seems to be more effective in measuring children's counterfactual emotion.These provide ideas for further exploring the development of children's regret and reilef in the future.