Happiness and counterfactual thinking at the 2016 Summer Olympic Games

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic turned into a global crisis. Focusing on the deterioration in people’s mental health, we conducted two experiments, one in Germany and one in the UK, in January and February 2021, when both countries were in lockdown. Using a COVID-19-themed sentence completion task, we tested the direction of counterfactual thoughts in relation to egocentric (self-focused) versus non-egocentric (other-focused) perspective-taking. Results show that in both samples, more upward counterfactuals (mental simulation of better counterfactual worlds, relating to negative emotions) than downward counterfactuals (mental simulation of worse counterfactual worlds, relating to positive emotions) were produced in the egocentric condition. An opposite pattern was found in the non-egocentric condition. We conclude that emotions as expressed in counterfactual language are perspective-dependent.

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Happiness and counterfactual thinking at the 2016 Summer Olympic Games

Cited by 2 publications

References 31 publications

Motivational and emotional effects of social comparison in sports

Motivational and emotional effects of social comparison in sports

Counterfactual language, emotion, and perspective: a sentence completion study during the COVID-19 pandemic

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