A Research Of College Students' The Process Of Inclination Forgiveness In Different Relationship

Forgiveness is a positive reaction when individual treat offender's offend, treat offends in a positive and object view. The positive reaction to the benefit of individual mental health and maintain good relations. It has been a lot of discussions about forgiveness and relationship in the world, but nearly all the researches are done from the cognitive process between them, and also are focused on the mediation process.Therefore, this study explores colleges' inclination of forgiveness and severity in offend by different relationship. Furthermore, the hypothesis of the study is that the inclination of forgive of family groups can be relatively automatically evoked; but in the other groups, the inclination of forgive can't be relatively automatically evoked.In this study, 278 college students are recruited. In the experiments, the objects randomly assigned into three groups, respectively family groups, friend groups and schoolmate groups. In addition, this study selects all offences are moderately severe.In the study 1, we employed a subliminal priming procedure to expose participants to the name of different relationship, which to detect participants' response when offended by family, friend, schoolmate and verify that forgiveness may be included in the cognitive representation of the relationship with the close other. The results show that inclination of forgiveness of participants in family groups is higher than friend groups and schoolmate groups, as well as the friend groups are higher than schoolmates. But the difference between families and friends, friends and schoolmates didn't reach significant level. The study 2 was measured by means of a word-stem completion task, which detects the accessibility of forgiveness is different, also importantly extends the study 1. The results of study 2 are similar with the study 1.Furthermore, the study 3 adds a factor- response time. The study 3 detects the inclination of forgiveness when people are given enough or limited time. The results demonstrate that the main effects of different relationship and time responses are significant, as well as there was a significant interaction effect between close relationship and time factor.Key findings are listed as follow:1. In the family groups, the higher degree of inclination of forgiveness, however,in the friend and classmate groups, the inclination of forgiveness is lower than family groups, namely family groups > friend groups > schoolmate groups;2. The severity evaluation of the offenses didn't reach the significant level in three groups;3. The offender is a relative, individual may also under limited response time be inclined to forgive the other to a relatively higher extent than friends and schoolmates.However, for participants of friends and schoolmates, the inclination of forgiveness in plenty response time is significant higher than in limited response time;4. The inclination of forgiveness is an automatic process when the offender is a relative.