The Influence Of The Observer And Its Intimate Relationship With The Individual On Regret

The influence of the observer and its intimate relationshipwith the individual on regretRegret result from counterfactual thinking,that is,comparing “what could have been obtained ” with “what has actually occurred”.People experience regret when alternative outcomes that could have occurred is better than that of their choice.However,regret in previous studies were often induced in an alone context,in which participants made decisions or received decision-feedback alone.But,in real world,individuals were frequently required to make decisions with the presence of others,such as friends,families,even strangers.Then,does the presence of others have an impact on individuals' regret? Does the degree of intimacy between participants and observers also affect regret? Furthermore,what's the neural mechanism behind it? Therefore,to address the above questions could facilitates to understand the factors of regret in the social context,and offers a new perspective to explore the modulation of regret on the decision making.In view of this,three experiments were conducted to explore the modulation of the presence of an observer and degree of intimacy between participants and observers on regret by a sequential decision task.Experiment 1 explores whether the presence of strangers and close friends has different effects on individual regret.Experiment 2 further deepens the intimacy between individuals and observers on the basis of experiment 1,and discussed the different effects of opposite-sex strangers and opposite-sex lovers on regret.Experiment 3 investigated the neural mechanism of bystander's presence on regret by ERPs.Results showed that,participants felt less regret when they were watched by an observer relative to when they were alone,indicating Audience Effect.Furthermore,the nature of the participant–observer relationship can,to some extent,modulated individual's regret.Specially,for Devil outcome(lost all the golds collected in one trial),participants' emotional ratings were higher(i.e.felt less regret)in the “presence of a stranger” than that in the “alone” context,while there was no significant difference between the “presence of their romantic partner” context and the “alone” context.Besides,Our findings revealed that the P300 were motivated by the presence of a stranger.In particular,for non-optimal outcome,the P300 amplitudes were lager in the “presence of a stranger” than that in the “alone” context.Taken together,the present results indicated that the presence of an observer and degree of intimacy between participants and observers can modulate the emotion of regret.