Pensando no passado para resolver problemas no futuro: o pensamento contrafactual se articula com a resolução de conflitos interpessoais?

• Autor(a) principal: Setti, Anik Giovanna Barham
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Trabalho de conclusão de curso
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFSCAR
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio.ufscar.br/handle/ufscar/14480
• topic: Contrafatos; Psicologia cognitiva; Resolução de conflitos; Cognitive psychology; Counterfactual thinking; Conflict resolution; CIENCIAS HUMANAS::PSICOLOGIA::PSICOLOGIA COGNITIVA

When people think about how past events could have turned out differently, or when they imagine "What if..." or "If only" scenarios, they are thinking counterfactually. Counterfactual thoughts usually follow negative outcomes and have many functions, including emotional regulation. When interpersonal conflicts occur, people often wish things had turned out differently; however, the role of counterfactual thinking in managing conflicts has not yet been investigated. In this study we examined whether interpersonal conflicts give rise to counterfactual thoughts, and if these thoughts affect conflict resolution, either by facilitating or complicating it, and if age could modulate the relationship between counterfactual thinking and conflict resolution. Twenty-four participants, half over eighteen, and half over 60 years of age were asked to complete two tasks. First, a short story describing an interpersonal conflict was read aloud. Participants had the opportunity to generate thoughts spontaneously, and then were prompted to produce counterfactual thoughts. Next, participants were asked to identify how each counterfactual thought might relate to conflict resolution. The second activity was similar; the only alteration was a substitution of the short story for participants' personal account of an episode of interpersonal conflict from their own lives. We used statistical procedures to analyze the frequency of different types of thoughts and compare them between both age groups. We found that interpersonal conflicts did give rise to counterfactual thoughts, though only at a rate of 10%. A simple prompt is sufficient, however, to increase the proportion of counterfactual thoughts to 80%. Most of these counterfactuals were self-focused, ascendant and additive, suggesting that they served a preparatory function, especially when participants thought about conflicts that did not involve them personally. When participants thought about their own conflicts, however, the counterfactuals they produces were more diverse; the proportion of descendant counterfactuals increased across all ages, possibly because emotional regulation was also activated in this condition. A personal perspective on a conflict also heralded an increase in subtractive thoughts among participants under 60, while participants over 60 produced a greater number of substitutive thoughts. We hypothesize that younger participants used subtractive thoughts to identify broad patterns of resources and challenges that could be explored or avoided in the future; older participants, in their turn, used substitutive thoughts to regulate emotions and build and assign meaning to their life journey.