The Researches On Relationships Between Counterfactual Thinking Tendency And Subjective Well Being Of Middle Aged People

Counterfactual thinking is an important characteristic of human consciousness in our daily life,Humans have the remarkable ability to infer how an event might have unfolded differently,without directly experiencing this alternative reality.People spontaneously create counterfactual alternatives to reality when they think “if only” or “what if” and imagine how the past could have been different.We employ such counterfactual reasoning to make sense of the past,plan courses of action,make emotional and social judgments,and guide adaptive behavior.Currently,the research on this kind of thinking is mainly focused on the basic concepts,functions and cognitive mechanism.In the research object,most of them focus on high school students and college students,and the research on children's counterfactual thinking is gradually improving.we will systematically introduces the concept and types,the function of counterfactual thinking,and the research progress of China's relevant counterfactual thinking;Based on this,this study discusses counterfactual thinking characteristics of middle age group,and the relationship between the counterfactual thinking and subjective well-being.In this study we selected 205 middle-aged people as subjects,using the method of a combination of story context and questionnaires,deeply discuss the characteristic of the middle-aged counterfactual thinking tendency and its influence on subjective well-being.The results show that:(1)the number of middle-aged people's counterfactual thinking shows no significant differenceon gender dimension.The direction of counterfactual thinking of middle aged has significant differences on gender dimension,women are more likely than men to engage in downward counterfactual thinking;The number and direction of counterfactual thinking significantly show significant difference on age group dimension.The number of counterfactual of middle-aged is significantly lessthan the control group,and more significantly tend to engage in upward counterfactual thinking.(2)There are mutual significant correlations among the direction of counterfactual thinking,emotionand subjective well-being.Relative the tendency for upward counterfactual thinking subjects,tend to be downward counterfactual thinking subjects was more positive emotions,but also a higher level of subjective well-being.(3)Emotion partially mediates between counterfactual thinking direction and subjective well-being,which means that counterfactual thinking direction can directly affect subjective well-being,can also indirectly affect subjective well-being by emotion.