The Effect Of Offender's Different Emotional Apology And Victim's Construal Level On Forgiveness

Forgiveness refers to a series of transformation process of prosocial motivation after the individual has been offended,which mainly reflect in the reduction of victim's revenge and avoidance motivation.Forgiveness is conductive to repair interpersonal relationship,improve the mental health of victim,and the offender are less likely to re-offend.therefore,how to improve forgiveness have become a hot topic to psychologists in recent year.The results show that offender's apology is an effective strategy to improve forgiveness,and the shame and guilt that expressed by the apology can play a greater role in the effectiveness of apologies.But apologies are not effective all the time which would be constrained by multiple factors.Among them,the victim's characteristics are an important factor to affect the effectiveness of apology.Just as the saying goes: in everything we do,we must suit our measures to people's concerned.So the apology should be combined with the victim's characteristics which can maximize the effectiveness of apology and promote forgiveness.Therefore,this paper intends to start from the perspective of construal level,to explore the effect of offender's apology for expressing guilt or shame and victim's construal level on forgiveness and it's internal mechanism.This article aims to explore the above issues through three study.In Study 1,we manipulated the construal level through social distance,Meanwhile,we evoked participants experiences of being offended with hypothetical situation,to explore the effect of offender's apology for expressing guilt or shame on forgiveness which in different social distance.In Study 2,we manipulated the construal level through the "How & why" task,we evoked participants experiences of being offended with hypothetical situation as the Study 2,to explore the effect of victim's construal level and offender's apology for expressing guilt or shame on forgiveness.On the basis of Study 1 and Study 2,In Study 3,we looked for the underlying causes or mechanisms between them,that is,whether the effect of victim's construal level and offender's apology for expressing guilt or shame can be mediated by the processing fluency and engagement,What's more,unlike Study 1 and Study 2,we manipulated the construal level through the Behavioral Identification Form(BIF),and a behavioural experiment was designed to increase the internal validity of the Study.The main conclusions are as follows.(1)The offender's apology for expressing guilt or shame and the psychological distance which perceived by the victim's interacts to influence forgiveness,that is an apology with shame is more likely to promote forgiveness than an apology with guilt when participants in distant social distance,while an apology with guilt is more likely to promote forgiveness than an apology with shame when participants in near social distance.(2)The offender's apology for expressing guilt or shame and victim's construal level interacts to influence forgiveness,that is,an apology with shame is more likely to promote forgiveness than an apology with guilt for high construal level participants,while an apology with guilt is more likely to promote forgiveness than an apology with shame for low construal level participants.(3)The offender's apology for expressing guilt or shame and victim's construal level could positively predicted forgiveness,besides,it can also be mediated by processing fluency or the mediational chains of processing fluency and engagement.