Counterfactual thinking is a set of mental representations of alternatives to the past actions. When it focuses on personal decisions, the emotion that results is regret, which has important implications for psychological distress (Borges et al., 2015). The Bedtime Counterfactual Processing Questionnaire (BCPQ; Schmidt and Linden, 2009) was developed to assess the frequency of regret-related counterfactual thoughts during the pre-sleep period.

To investigate the psychometric properties of the BCPQ (extended version) Portuguese version.

A community sample composed of 108 university students and 79 employees (78.1% females; mean age = 33.16 ± 13.175; range: 17-62) answered the Portuguese preliminary versions of the BCPQ and Regret Scale (Schwartz et al., 2002). To study the temporal stability, 31 participants (83.9% females; mean age = 26.54 ± 18.761) answered the BCPQ again after 6 weeks.

The BCPQ2 Cronbach alpha was “very good” (a = 0.81). All the items contributed to the internal consistency. The test-retest correlation coefficient was high, positive and significant (0.78; P = 0.05); there was not significant difference between test and re-test scores [29.87 ± 5.309 vs. 30.13 ± 5.353, t (30) = −0.204, P = 0.840]. Following the Kaiser and the Cattel's Scree Plot criteria, two meaningful factors were extracted which explained variance (EV) was of 65.06%: F1 Regret (EV 43.17%; a = 0.88), F2 low pride (21.88%; a = 0.88). Pearson correlations of EA total score with BCPQ2 and F1 were significant and moderate (r@.50) and with F2 was non-significant.

Although the Portuguese version of the extended version of BCPQ has good reliability and validity, the low pride-related dimension seems to be relatively independent of regret.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.