Regret, like guilt and fear, seems in a fundamental respect different from such emotions as amusement and disgust. Whereas amusement presents itself as a response to some sui generis form of value, the funny, regret seems to concern something with which we're already deeply concerned, quite independently of our tendencies to regret. What we regret, paradigmatically, are our bad choices or actions: Our mistakes, in a word. That is not to say that we can only regret mistakes, or only acts we take to be mistaken; but this is clearly the standard case. In the sense of regret on which we will focus here, it involves reproaching oneself for a decision, and it functions to motivate the agent to try to undo the action if possible and to act differently next time. Though it makes sense to lament an unlucky outcome or a poor set of options, if one decided well then regret would be inapt (though not impossible) to feel. Regret seems to be about something even a rational but disaffected alien, who was immune to regret, would care about: roughly, making bad decisions. By contrast, such an alien would have no interest, except perhaps anthropological interest, in the funny or the disgusting. Call this concern for mistakes the intentional aspect of regret.

Regret factors into human decision-making in another way, however, which would be of no importance to an agent immune to the sentiment. Like amusement and disgust, regret is an intrinsically valenced state: it is painful.