The Influencing Factors Of Forgiveness And Relations Between Forgiveness And Mental Health For Undergraduates

Forgiveness can be conceptualized as a psychological process that a person' responses towards an offender are transferred from negative to positive after some offensive events in interpersonal relationship. The influencing factors of forgiveness include social cognition, related factors of offensive events, interpersonal relationship, personality, empathy and demographic and cultural variables. Relations between forgiveness and mental health were always one of the important contents in studies of forgiveness psychology abroad. They all agreed that forgiveness was in favor of one's mental health. Studies on forgiveness are still limited. This study emphatically discussed the influencing factors of forgiveness and relations between forgiveness and mental health for undergraduates based on revising the Forgiveness Scale and the Forgiveness Likelihood Scale, using undergraduates as its researching objects.The results of this study were mainly as follows:(1) The Forgiveness Scale has three factors: Elimination of self attention, Absence of Negative and Presence of Positive. The Forgiveness Likelihood Scale has two factors: Forgiveness Likelihood for Heavy Offensive Events and Forgiveness Likelihood for Light Offensive Events. Both of them have adequate internal consistency reliability.(2) Sex, grade, singleton or not, arts or science, etc. have no significant differences on forgiveness for undergraduates except religious belief, while other demographic variables all have significant differences except singleton or not.(3) The factors that influence forgiveness for undergraduates are mainly as follows: apologize or not, injury degree, types of interpersonal relationship and forgiveness likelihood. It demonstrates as follows: there are significant differences on scores of the Forgiveness Scale between those who received apologies after the offensive events and those who not (p<.001) . In addition, if the apologies were more acceptable, the participant got higher scores on the Forgiveness Scale. There are significant differences for forgiveness on the relationship types between offenders and the participants; people were most likely to forgive their...