A study on the impact of forgiveness intervention on mainland Chinese college students

Abstract

With the increasing use of forgiveness interventions as therapy and educational programmes, a lot of studies have been conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the interventions. However, most of the existing intervention studies do not consider the cultural elements in forgiveness. The current study aimed to fill this gap by conducting research on forgiveness interventions in Chinese cultural context. The researcher devised a forgiveness programme by integrating the programme based on Enright-Process-Model with another programme based on Chinese cultural values. To examine the effects of the forgiveness programme on the participants’ forgiveness attitudes and other psychological variables, a 3-phase study design combining quantitative and qualitative approaches was adopted. In Phase I, the reliabilities and validities of the instruments (i.e., Decisional Forgiveness Scale, Emotional Forgiveness Scale, and Batson’s Empathy Adjectives) were examined with the sample of 194 college students (114 males and 80 females) in Nanjing. The instruments were used in the intervention studies (Phase II and Phase III). In Phase II study, two 4-session forgiveness programmes which were based on the Enright psycho-social process model and the Chinese cultural values respectively were conducted for 24 college students in Zhuhai. Based on both the quantitative and qualitative findings of the two brief programmes, a 10-session forgiveness programme integrating Chinese cultural values and the Enright Process Model was devised and implemented among 28 college students in Zhuhai (16 in experimental group and 12 in control group; 2 males and 26 females) in Phase III, the main study. The findings disclosed that gains in forgiveness attitudes in the experimental group were significantly higher than those in the control group. The improvement in the experimental group was maintained at the follow-up test after 3-month. Gains of state-anxiety in the experimental group, meanwhile, were marginally higher than those of the control group, while gains of empathy and self-esteem had no significant differences between groups. The qualitative findings further revealed the participants’ understandings of forgiveness and the strategies that influence forgiveness. The strategies facilitating forgiveness included engaging in perspective taking, taking self-responsibility, cultivating empathy, having positive thinking, and stopping rumination. In contrast, repeated offences, severe hurt experience from the offence, no apology from the offenders, and no continued relationship are perceived as factors that hinder the participants’ forgiveness. In addition, Chinese values of harmony and face were found to be pertinent factors influencing participants’ decision to forgive. The implications of the findings are discussed. Theoretically, the integration of the Enright Forgiveness Process Model and Chinese cultural values was effective in promoting forgiveness attitudes and psychological well-being with Chinese participants in the collectivist cultural setting. Practically, elements such as reconciliation need to be included in the forgiveness interventions with Chinese participants. Chinese educators are suggested to use the experiential psycho-social approach rather than the indoctrinatory approach to cultivate the value and strategies of forgiveness. The limitations of the study and suggestions for future research are also presented.