| dc.description.abstract | The narratives we formulate about our lives are vital to our sense of well-being, meaning in life, and self-understanding. Counterfactual thinking (CFT), or mental simulations that imagine alternatives to past events, is a cognitive process often used to better understand specific past events in our lives. Extant literature has shown that CFTs can help us make sense or derive meaning from a past event. Importantly, related work on mental simulation and regret suggests that a thought’s temporal focus (i.e., either imagining the process or antecedents leading up to an outcome versus imagining just the outcome itself or the consequence of the process) may have downstream effects. The present research applied this distinction to counterfactual thinking and examined how it influences our understanding of past events. In three studies, I examined two different contexts, trauma (Studies 1 and 2) and life turning points (Study 3), and measured the effect that process CFT versus outcome CFT has on well-being, meaning-making, and self-understanding. Organized as an exploratory investigation, the results of the studies endeavored to describe the types of thoughts participants were most likely to have along with correlates to some downstream effects. Basic interpretations of those exploratory results are also described. | en |
