Research On The Influence Of Victim Sensitivity And Empathy On Forgiveness In The State Of Ego-depletion

With increasingly burden of daily life pressure,interpersonal conflicts and downsides of life experience,under the condition of offensive events,the decision of whether to forgive the offender has become the key to improve the quality of interpersonal interaction.Four studies were conducted in this paper.Study 1: college students(as participants)were divided into high ego-depletion and low ego-depletion groups in this single factor experiment,and interpersonal motivational aggression scale was used to measure the participants’ level of forgiveness in the offending situations.Study 1verified that ego-depletion will decrease the participants’ level of forgiveness.Based on study 1,study 2 added situational variables,but also focused on the characteristics of the participants which means their personalities also as a variable.In this experiment,two factors of victim sensitivity(high vs.low)x ego-depletion(high vs.low)was designed among subjects,which aims to explore forgiveness after ego-depletion and whether the interaction effect of the victim sensitivity and ego-depletion exists.The results of study 2 revealed the effect of ego-depletion and the effect of victim sensitivity on forgiveness,and also the interaction effect between ego-depletion and victim sensitivity.Considering how to improve different participants’ level of forgiveness on the basis of different ego-depletion level,empathy was introduced in study 3.Through the way of situation inducing empathy,a two-factor between subjects experiment was conducted,namely the victim sensitivity(high vs.low)x ego-depletion(high vs.low)to explore the effect of empathy on college students’ forgiveness level of different victim sensitivity level and different ego-depletion level,to test the compensatory effect.The comparison between the results of study 3 and study 2 revealed that situation-induced empathy could indeed compensate for the forgiveness level of different victim-sensitive college students after high and low ego-depletion.In order to make up for the shortcomings of study 3,study 4 used the classical priming task to further explore the compensatory effect of empathy.The results of study 4 and study 2 were compared to further clarify the compensatory effect of state empathy on the forgiveness level of students with different victim sensitivity after ego-depletion.Accordingly,the research conclusions of this study are as follows:1.Victim sensitivity will affect the forgiveness level of the subjects.The more sensitive the victim is,the less likely it is to forgive others.2.Ego-depletion can interfere with forgiveness.The higher ego-depletion is,the harder to forgive others.There was no gender difference in the level of forgiveness under ego-depletion.3.For individuals with high victim sensitivity,ego-depletion can further decrease their level of forgiveness,while for individuals with low victim sensitivity,ego-depletion cannot further reduce their level of forgiveness.4.Empathy has a compensatory effect on the level of forgiveness of different victims with high and low sensitivity after ego-depletion.