Few emotions are as nagging as regret —the mourning and melancholy that comes from fearing you picked the wrong mate, pursued the wrong career, or ended a marriage that you maybe could have saved. Over the course of a lifetime, there are a lot of such hinge points. It would seem to follow that the longer you live , the more regrets you’ll have. But a new study published in the journal Emotion finds that the opposite is actually true: older people have fewer regrets than younger people—and handle them better when they do. “In general, older people seem to pull back more and not to think as much about the regrets or what they should do about them,” says lead author Julia Nolte, assistant professor in the department of psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.…