Mental contrasting of counterfactual fantasies attenuates disappointment, regret, and resentment

“If only I had married that girl, my life would have been different. We would have been a good match for each other and we would have made a great couple...” Such mental representations of how our lives could have been better are termed counterfactual, representing an alternative scenario to the factual past (Kahneman and Miller 1986; Kahneman and Tversky 1982; Roese 1997). People who engage in spontaneous counterfactual thinking tend to elaborate on better alternatives to past events (i.e., upward counterfactuals; Nasco and Marsh 1999; Roese 1997). Those idealized upward counterfactuals emerge in response to negative affect about past events (Markman et al. 1993; Roese 1997; Roese and Hur 1997). In a reciprocal way, they lead to even more negative affect, because the current reality seems worse in contrast to the idealized counterfactual past (affective contrast; Roese 1994; Roese and Morrison 2009).