Cultural variation in the role of responsibility in regret and disappointment: The Italian case

Regret and disappointment are decision-making related emotions. We examine the relation between these emotions and responsibility for the decision outcomes in the Italian language. This is interesting because in Italian, there exist multiple words that refer to regret and disappointment. We base our research on earlier studies by Zeelenberg, Van Dijk, Manstead, and Van der Pligt (1998) and Zeelenberg, Van Dijk, and Manstead (2000) and by Ordonez and Connolly (2000). The results show that several factors (terms, experimental situation and design) influence the relationship between responsibility on the one hand, and regret and disappointment on the other. As such we provide a demonstration of how emotion words and emotional experiences do not always have a one-to-one relationship. We suggest that it is important to take these factors into consideration when we investigate cognitive emotions such as regret and disappointment, which play a pivotal role in economic and consumer behavior. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.