Forgive and forget: Differences between decisional and emotional forgiveness

Lichtenfeld, S.; Buechner, V.L.; Maier, M.A.; Fernández-Capo, M.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0125561

Forgive and forget: Differences between decisional and emotional forgiveness

Lichtenfeld, S.; Buechner, V.L.; Maier, M.A.; Fernández-Capo, M.

Authors

Dr Stephanie Lichtenfeld stephanie.lichtenfeld@durham.ac.uk
Honorary Fellow

V.L. Buechner

M.A. Maier

M. Fernández-Capo

Abstract

To forgive and forget is a well-known idiom, which has rarely been looked at empirically. In the current experiment, we investigated differences between emotional and decisional forgiveness on forgetting. The present study provides the first empirical support that emotional forgiveness has a strong influence on subsequent incidental forgetting. Specifically, our results demonstrate that emotional forgiveness leads to substantially higher levels of forgetting in respect to offense relevant traits compared to both decisional forgiveness and no forgiveness. This provides evidence for our hypothesized effect that only individuals who have emotionally forgiven a transgression, and not those who just decided to forgive, subsequently forget offense relevant traits attributed to the transgressor.

Citation

Lichtenfeld, S., Buechner, V., Maier, M., & Fernández-Capo, M. (2015). Forgive and forget: Differences between decisional and emotional forgiveness. PLoS ONE, 10(5), Article e0125561. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0125561

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Mar 25, 2015
Online Publication Date	May 6, 2015
Publication Date	May 6, 2015
Deposit Date	Nov 7, 2017
Publicly Available Date	Nov 7, 2017
Journal	PLoS ONE
Publisher	Public Library of Science
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	10
Issue	5
Article Number	e0125561
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0125561

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Copyright Statement
© 2015 Lichtenfeld et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.