Personality after the prime of life: Men and women coming to terms with regrets

Both Erikson and Butler propose that successfully coming to terms with life regrets facilitates positive personality development in late adulthood. We examined life regrets, concurrent well-being, and three categories of current interpretation of past (regretted) events (not having come to terms, putting the best face on it, and coming to terms) in a heterogeneous sample of men and women in their early 60s. We found that about half of the sample reported at least one of two kinds of regrets, that acknowledging regrets was associated with lower scores on well-being, and that the relationship of regret to well-being was mitigated by certain current interpretations.