Instead, it changes your emotional attitude towards the event: memories remain alive and detailed, but your emotional reaction to them becomes less severe and negative.
The authors of the study were interested in exactly what happened in the mind when it forgive. There are different theories: one indicates that forgiveness helps to weaken the crime memory due to a decrease in the frequency of ideas around them-the so-called “accidental fading”.
Another theory, “emotional fading”, claims that forgiveness does not affect the accuracy of memories, but only changes the emotional perception of the event.
As for the study, a research team led by Gabriella Fernandez Miranda of Duke University conducted four studies that included approximately 1500 people. The participants were asked to remember the unfair treatment cases that they forgot or not, and to evaluate the characteristics of their memories, whether in terms of details and emotional resonance.
The results of the first two studies showed that the people who were forgiven for the perpetrator suffered from less negative and less intense feelings when calling the event. However, the level of details and the vitality of memories did not differ from those who did not forgive.
This observation remained when taking into account the seriousness of the crime, which indicates that emotional attenuation is not related to a change in the perception of the event itself, but with the treatment of emotions when remembering it.
“I was interested in how the victims of serious crimes in Colombia tolerated their perpetrators, while many of us find it difficult to forgive less crimes,” Fernandez Miranda explained.
She added that she assumed that the frequency of the cavity could differ depending on the remission, but the data showed that this is not the case, which indicates that the cavity was not the basic mechanism of tolerance.
In the third study, the participants not only remembered the incidents in which they were victims, but also the incidents in which they were perpetrators. The results confirmed the previous results: The forgiveness was accompanied by a decrease in the emotional density of memories, while the content and details remained unchanged.
The fourth study focused on the relationship between forgiveness and attitudes towards the perpetrator. Participants who forgave less desire to take revenge and avoid communication, as well as positive situations. However, emotional feelings were associated when the crime was strongly remembered by these changes in the situation, rather than what they felt at the time of the accident.
The study confirms that forgiveness does not mean forgetting or reducing the importance of the painful event. Memory is preserved, but emotional pain is reduced. At the same time, crimes were seen as less disturbing, which could indicate a psychological compromise that facilitates reconciliation.
The authors note that the data was collected primarily from Western participants, which limits the general results. In addition, studies relied on self -reports retroactively instead of long notes of changes in memory and forgiveness. Future studies are planned to expand samples to gain a deeper understanding of forgiveness.
