How people regulate their emotions greatly impacts their mental health. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how individual traits influence which emotion regulation strategies people choose to use and how effective they are. One trait, the consideration of future consequences (CFC), refers to the degree to which people take future outcomes into account when making decisions. Focusing on the future may increase the use of strategies that are beneficial in the long-term, such as reappraisal (thinking differently about a negative event to reduce unpleasant feelings), rather than using maladaptive strategies like distraction (thinking about something unrelated to the situation). However, few studies examine the link between emotion regulation and CFC using experiments which induce real emotions in people. The current study used a newly developed task to induce real regret. Subsequently, participants were directed to focus on either the long- or short-term consequences of their regret, before choosing to implement either reappraisal or distraction. I expected that a future focus would increase the choice of reappraisal over distraction, especially in those who were high, compared to low, in trait CFC. However, results did not indicate a significant relationship between CFC, temporal focus, and participants’ ratings of strategy preference or their choice to implement one strategy over the other. These results are not in line with previous work in the area and may have been heavily influenced by an inadequate sample size.
