Abstract
Apology from the offender facilitates forgiveness and thus has the power to restore a broken relationship. Here we showed that apology from the offender not only reduces the victim’s propensity to react aggressively but also alters the victim’s implicit attitude and neural responses toward the offender. We adopted an interpersonal competitive game which consisted of two phases. In the first, “passive” phase, participants were punished by high or low pain stimulation chosen by the opponents when losing a trial. During the break, participants received a note from each of the opponents, one apologizing and the other not. The second, “active” phase, involved a change of roles where participants could punish the two opponents after winning. Experiment 1 included an Implicit Association Test (IAT) in between the reception of notes and the second phase. Experiment 2 recorded participants’ brain potentials in the second phase. We found that participants reacted less aggressively toward the apologizing opponent than the non-apologizing opponent in the active phase. Moreover, female, but not male, participants responded faster in the IAT when positive and negative words were associated with the apologizing and the non-apologizing opponents, respectively, suggesting that female participants had enhanced implicit attitude toward the apologizing opponent. Furthermore, the late positive potential (LPP), a component in brain potentials associated with affective/motivational reactions, was larger when viewing the portrait of the apologizing than the non-apologizing opponent when participants subsequently selected low punishment. Additionally, the LPP elicited by the apologizing opponents’ portrait was larger in the female than in the male participants. These findings confirm the apology’s role in reducing reactive aggression and further reveal that this forgiveness process engages, at least in female, an enhancement of the victim’s implicit attitude and a prosocial motivational change toward the offender.
Highlights
Interpersonal conflicts are ubiquitous in our social life
For the decision phase, we focused on N2 and the late positive potential (LPP)
We found that the reaction times for the female participants in the congruent condition (M = 786 ms, SD = 132) were significantly faster than those in the incongruent condition (M = 885 ms, SD = 171), F(1,33) = 5.7, p = 0.022, while there was no significant difference between the two conditions for male participants
Summary
Interpersonal conflicts are ubiquitous in our social life. Social psychologists define forgiveness as a set of changes whereby one feels decreased negative emotions toward the offender, reduced motivation to retaliate or punish, and an increase in will to continue the relationship despite the offender’s hurtful actions (McCullough et al, 1997; Worthington, 2006). The offender must acknowledge his/her responsibility and express remorse (Lazare, 2004), demonstrate that he/she is a trustful person, and that both parties share the same moral values. In these terms, apology meets the conditions required for forgiveness, and constitutes a crucial remedy for interpersonal conflict
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