ATTITUDE
Nobody's perfect. So how do some people stay so cool under pressure? A new study suggests that they focus not on what might have gone better but on what could have gone worse.
These "what if?" thoughts are counterfactuals, events that didn't happen but can easily be imagined as having occurred. When we're in high spirits, "we want to maintain the mood," says Lawrence Senna, Ph.D. So when mulling over the past, we automatically think up downward counterfactuals like "At least I didn't make a fool of myself." When feeling low though, we reinforce our bad mood by generating upward counterfactuals like "I should have said `thanks.'" But Senna's new study shows that people with high self-esteem cope better with negative situations by instinctively using downward counterfactuals to create a cheerier take on the past.
Using music and film clips, Senna and colleagues at Washington State University induced good and bad moods in subjects, then told them to recall a past event and agree to either downward or upward counterfactuals about how it could have gone differently. People in good moods responded most often to downward counterfactuals. Those in bad moods, however, reacted in two ways: While people with low self-esteem agreed fastest and most frequently to mood-lowering statements, high self-esteem subjects chose mood-lifting statements, but slowly.
