College Students' Understanding Of Forgiveness And Its Type

Forgiveness is a virtue, it originated from religion. We can defineforgiveness from four aspects: in cognition, people give up revenge; inemotion, resentful and sad mood turn to neutral; in behavior tendency,people can treat offender with goodness; in further development,people can get rid of the serious injuries.Forgiveness research focus on forgiveness scale, intervention studyand forgiveness mechanism in foreign studies. Enright and McCulloughare typical representatives in forgiveness field. While forgivenessresearch is inadequate in our country, some even can not distinguishthe concept of forgiveness from other concepts, such as excusing,reconciliation, endurance and so on. College students took part in thisresearch as participants, with the method of questionnaire investigation.Through the research, the purpose is to clear the differences betweenthe concepts and enrich the forgiveness study field.Through study1, the purpose was to investigate the concept offorgiveness and to choose the forgiveness situation. The results are asfollows: firstly, college students know forgiveness well; secondly, physicalinjury, emotional hurt and property damage are chosen as forgivenesssituation; thirdly, behavioral intention and the seriousness of the hurtmay influence one’s tendency of forgiveness.Study2was about the definition of forgiveness and relevantconcepts. The results show that college students can distinguishforgiveness, excusing, reconciliation and endurance from each otherwell. It is significant in different gender and grades in understandingthese concepts.Study3examined behavioral intention and the seriousness of theconsequences, which may influence one’s forgiveness likelihood. Theresults show that college students’ the tendency of forgiveness highest in physical injury, followed by the property damage, and finally theemotional hurt. College students are more likely to forgive unintentionaloffense or the seriousness of incident low.Study4focused on the forgiveness type of college students. Theresults are as follows: there is significant difference in different types. Theorder of precedence is forgiveness for social harmony, forgiveness aslove, lawful expectational forgiveness, expectational forgiveness,conditional or restitutional forgiveness, revengeful forgiveness. There issignificant difference between different gender and grade inforgiveness types.