How Does the Presence of a Social Other Affect the Perception of Emotions? A Preliminary Report

Regret is an emotion that may be experienced by a decision-maker that learns that an alternative choice would have led to a better outcome. How the pres-ence of a social other affects a decision maker’s percep-tion of regret is still an open question. Zeelenberg and Pieters (2004) asked subjects to describe the emotions they thought they would experience in hypothetical sit-uations involving lotteries. In the Netherlands there is a special type of lottery, the Postcode Lottery, where postal code numbers are randomly drawn and all the residents living in that postal code area share the prize, conditioned that they have purchased a ticket. The re-sults showed a clear increase in the regret ratings in the situations involving the Postcode Lottery- where it was said that a “neighbor ” had won the prize. Boles an