Lichtenfeld Stephanie, Maier Markus A, Buechner Vanessa L, Fernández Capo Maria
School of Education, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Munich, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2019 Jun 25;10:1425. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01425. eCollection 2019.
Research on forgiveness suggests that forgiveness is an emotion-focused coping process important for clinical settings as it can promote both physical and mental health (Worthington et al., 2005; Witvliet and McCullough, 2007). Investigating antecedents of forgiveness, empirical studies and theoretical models propose that attributions influence forgiveness. However, hardly any studies or theoretical models have ever looked at the possibility that this relationship may be reciprocal in nature and whether forgiveness also impacts a victim's attributions has not been investigated. The present, highly powered ( = 969) study seeks to fill this gap and provides the first empirical support that emotional forgiveness has a strong influence on subsequent attributions. Specifically, individuals, who have emotionally forgiven a transgression, hold the transgressor less responsible for the offense compared to those in the decisional forgiveness and control condition. Moreover, the findings conceptually replicate previous research (Lichtenfeld et al., 2015) by demonstrating that emotional, but not decisional forgiveness affects cognition and, thus, emotional and decisional forgiveness should be treated as distinct facets in the forgiveness process. Implications of these results for clinical and health psychology are discussed.
关于宽恕的研究表明，宽恕是一种以情绪为导向的应对过程，在临床环境中很重要，因为它可以促进身心健康（沃辛顿等人，2005年；维特弗利特和麦卡洛，2007年）。在探究宽恕的前因时，实证研究和理论模型提出归因会影响宽恕。然而，几乎没有任何研究或理论模型探讨过这种关系在本质上可能是相互的这一可能性，并且宽恕是否也会影响受害者的归因也尚未得到研究。本项样本量很大（=969）的研究旨在填补这一空白，并首次提供了实证支持，即情感上的宽恕对后续归因有很大影响。具体而言，与处于决策性宽恕和控制条件下的个体相比，那些在情感上宽恕了冒犯行为的个体认为冒犯者对该罪行的责任较小。此外，这些发现从概念上重复了先前的研究（利希滕费尔德等人，2015年），表明情感上而非决策性的宽恕会影响认知，因此，情感上的宽恕和决策性的宽恕在宽恕过程中应被视为不同的方面。本文还讨论了这些结果对临床和健康心理学的启示。
