Forgive like You Mean It: Sincerity of Forgiveness and the Experience of Negative Affect

Abstract

When individuals experience forgiveness, it can free them from negative emotion. What happens, though, when individuals’ internal experience and their external expression of forgiveness do not correspond? Individuals, for instance, can communicate forgiveness to a partner, even if that forgiveness is not genuine. Although this might create a veneer of forgiveness in relationships, underlying negativity could persist. To examine this issue, this study tested the moderating effects of sincerity on the relationship between victims’ forgiveness communication and their experience of ongoing negative emotion. Results showed that direct forgiveness negatively, and conditional forgiveness positively, predicted negative affect, but those relationships were contingent on victims’ sincerity level. Sincerity, moreover, was positively predicted by victims’ self-esteem and perceptions of offender accounts.

Keywords:

• Anger
• Hurtful Messages
• Interpersonal Forgiveness
• Relationship Maintenance
• Speech Acts
• Transgressions

Notes

Note. **p < 0.001; *p < 0.05 R ² = 0.02 for Step 1; ΔR ² = 0.14 for Step 2 and 0.17 for Step 3; Total R ² = 0.33 F(8, 286) = 17.66, p < 0.001.

Note. ***p < 0.001; **p < 0.01; *p < 0.05. R ² = 0.03 for Step 1; ΔR ² = 0.19 for Step 2; Total R ² = 0.22, F(5, 289) = 16.53, p < 0.001.

Notes

Though not significantly related to age and ethnicity, offender response had a small positive point-biserial correlation with sex (r = 0.18, p < 0.05), indicating that women received more complete apologies from offenders. This result might be interpreted as evidence that apologies feature slightly more prominently in women's (relative to men's) conflict scripts (Miller, 1991). Alternatively, recent research suggests that women, compared to men, perceive interpersonal offenses as more severe (Schumann & Ross, 2010), which might explain why women reported receiving stronger apologies from their offenders prior to communicating forgiveness. Stronger apologies often become more important as perceived offense severity escalates.

It is interesting to note that the zero-order correlations between ONA and the forgiveness styles (direct, indirect, and conditional) demonstrated a different pattern than did the regression results. The zero-order correlation between conditional forgiveness and ONA, for example, was nonsignificant (r = 0.05), whereas the zero-order correlations were significant for indirect (r = −0.17) and direct (r = −0.32) forgiveness. Thus, the hypothesized significant effect of conditional forgiving on ONA, which was found in the regression analysis, reveals itself only after the effects of other forgiveness styles were partialed out. This is likely because when other forgiveness styles are controlled for, all that remains for conditional forgiveness are the effects of the conditions themselves. This is an important qualification to this study's findings and represents a notable methodological consideration for future research of conditional forgiving.

One additional test was conducted for H4. Because the direct forgiveness factor contained verbal and nonverbal items, the direct verbal item of “I told them I forgave them” was isolated and used in the moderation test. In other words, the same regression analysis used to test H4 was rerun in the exact same way, save the one change of replacing the five-item direct factor with the single direct verbal forgiveness item. The moderation was again confirmed using this approach. In addition to a statistically significant omnibus model, R ² = 0.32, F(10, 279) = 13.06, there was a significant ΔR ² of 0.03 for the interaction term on the fourth step, B = −0.10, SE = 0.03, t = −3.69, p < 0.001. Probing this interaction with the J-N procedure indicated a region of significance of 3.96 to 7.0, which was slightly narrower than the region of significance for the overall direct factor (i.e., 3.32 to 7.0). The pattern, however, was the same, such that direct forgiveness became a weaker predictor of ONA as forgiveness sincerity decreased.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andy J. Merolla

Andy J. Merolla (Ph.D., The Ohio State University, 2007) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Arts & Sciences at Baldwin Wallace University. A version of this paper was presented at the 2010 convention of the National Communication Association, San Francisco, CA.