A Study On The Relationship Of Religion And Forgiveness Among College Students

With the development of positive psychology, forgiveness has become one of the hot topics of psychological researchs for its benefit to interpersonal harmony and well-being.Religion generally advocate forgiveness, simultaneously forgiveness was earliest elaborated in the Bible. Empirical research on the relationship between religion and forgiveness that includes self-forgiveness and interpersonal forgiveness is absent in our country. In this study,We chose college students as the research object, combining questionnaire survey,experimental study and qualitative research method to explore the relationship between them.The first study researched the relationship between college students’ self-forgiveness and Christian faith, used Wohl’s "state of self-forgiveness Scale" evised by Tang Shujun and Yu Feng to measure Christian and non-religious college students. For Christian students,added some topics like "the time of becoming a Christian" and "the time of being baptized",in order to detect the extent of religious piety. The first study also provides potential subjects for the two subsequent researchs.Study 2 adopted experimental method to explore the impact of Christian faith to interpersonal forgiveness, referenced "Enright Forgiveness Scale" and "Forgiveness Scale",using E-prime to produce texperimental material, inviting non-religious groups and the Christian faith group Students to participate the experiment, the data of experiment results and choice reaction time were collected.The third research using qualitative research methods, based on the previous two studies, outstanding subjects were interviewed, to further explore the relationship between religion and forgiveness.The main results and conclusions of our research are listed below:(1) Students’ self-forgiveness is above the medium level, but existing no gender difference grade difference.(2) The Christian faith Students is relatively harder to forgive themselves, May be due to the Christian faith makes a devout believer entrust self-forgiveness to their object ofworship and then ruminate continuously.(3) The seriousness of the consequences of violationsis is the primary factor of interpersonal forgiveness.(4) The Christian faith Students’ capacity of negative reactions disappear in interpersonal forgiveness are lower than non-religious students’, because devout believers do not accept his subconscious to experience negative reactions and ruminate continuously,making difficult to eliminate negative reactions.