Counterfactual thinking and Aging: the role of executive function

People frequently think about how events in the past might have happened differently and these thoughts play a central role in their cognitive, emotional and social functioning. Our study examined how these processes change with age. A group of 56 younger (mean age 22.34) and 50 older (mean age 71.96) adults completed tasks measuring the spontaneous generation of counterfactual thoughts, the generation of counterfactual thoughts when cued and the Counterfactual Inference Test which taps into the ease with which salient counterfactual thoughts come to mind. They also completed a Counterfactual Seeking Task to measure their motivation to seek out counterfactual outcomes of unchosen events. In addition, participants completed measures of executive functioning and working memory capacity. Older adults generated fewer counterfactual thoughts across all measures and were marginally less likely to seek counterfactual information. Our performance measures of counterfactual thinking were independent suggesting that they tap into different processes. Age related changes in executive functioning were associated with a reduction in cued counterfactual thinking but not with our other measures of counterfactual thinking which may be more automatic. The results have important implications for cognition, emotion and well-being in older age.