A post by Felipe De Brigard.

For the past few years, my lab has been doing research on what we call episodic counterfactual thinking (eCFT): our psychological capacity to imagine alternative ways in which past personal events could have occurred. For instance, when I recall choosing the wrong answer in a multiple-choice exam and, upon retrieval, imagine instead picking the right one, I am exercising eCFT. In this entry I would like to draw attention to a recent theoretical piece, published in collaboration with Dr. Natasha Parikh, in which we tried to characterize eCFT by contrast to related mental simulations varying along three dimensions: temporal context, degree of episodic detail, and modal profile. In that piece, we argue that extant empirical evidence strongly suggests that, while related along these three dimensions, eCFT may be a psychological process different from episodic memory (eM), episodic future (eFT), and semantic counterfactual thinking (sCF). This entry is an abridged version of our piece, which can be found here.

A Post by Felipe De Brigard.

Our tendency to imagine alternative ways in which past personal events could have occurred instead is frequent and ubiquitous. Traditionally, researchers have argued that these episodic counterfactual thoughts play at least two fundamental functional roles in human psychology (Roese, 1997). On the one hand, upward and additive counterfactuals, which tend to generate negative emotions (e.g., regret), are thought to serve a preparative function in anticipation of similar events that may occur in the future. The idea, to put it simply, is that mentally simulating episodic counterfactual thoughts helps us try out hypothetical versions of events that may re-occur in the future. On the other hand, downward and subtractive counterfactuals, which tend to generate positive emotions (e.g., relief), are thought to serve an affective function in helping agents feel better about their experienced outcomes. However, certain results have proved difficult to explain by this traditional view. For instance, it has been shown that not all downward counterfactuals produced the positive emotions previously associated with their affective role, and that not all upward counterfactuals generated the motivational affect previously associated with their preparative role.