Depending on which political party you speak to, either the end is in sight, or the end is nigh. With just three sleeps until polling day, both Conservative and Labour campaigns are zoning in on a key emotion: regret.

Anticipating a landslide, Rishi Sunak is telling voters: don’t regret what you’re about to do. He is warning not to “surrender” to a Labour “supermajority”, a prospect “from which it would take decades to recover”. By contrast, Keir Starmer is outbidding Sunak with another message – “change” – while also telling voters they will regret sticking with the Tories.

Is regret a good motivator to get your vote out? Only up to a point, according to Aidan Feeney, a professor of psychology at Queens University, Belfast.

“There is considerable evidence that people use anticipated emotion as a decision-making guide,” Feeney told i. “Studies also show that loss avoidance is a motivator in decision-making along with anticipated emotions such as regret, so Sunak is right to focus on that, although it’s only one side of the........

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