“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...

Past research on counterfactual thinking has often found that upward counterfactual thoughts lead to increased motivation to improve in future, although at the cost of increased negative affect. The present studies suggest that because upward counterfactual thoughts indicate reasons for a poor performance, they can also serve as excuses. In this case, upward counterfactual thoughts should resul...