Needs Of Offenders Research Articles

A needs-based perspective on self-forgiveness: Addressing threat to moral identity as a means of encouraging interpersonal and intrapersonal restoration

Committing an offense creates psychological need within a victim and offender that can act as barriers to reconciliation. This paper examines the process of an offender addressing these needs independent of a victim's response in order to facilitate a process of self-forgiveness that promotes reconciliation and self-trust. We present two studies involving interventions following recent real-life interpersonal transgressions. Results suggest that meeting an offender's need for moral identity through the affirmation of the values violated by the offense, but not affirmation of belonging (Study 1), or affirmation of unrelated values (Study 2) increased genuine self-forgiveness, through shame acknowledgment. This process had downstream benefits for reconciliation and self-trust at one week follow-up.

Compassion-focused reappraisal, benefit-focused reappraisal, and rumination after an interpersonal offense: Emotion-regulation implications for subjective emotion, linguistic responses, and physiology

This repeated measures psychophysiology experiment studied three responses to a past interpersonal offense (38 females and 33 males). We compared rumination with two offense reappraisal strategies. Compassion-focused reappraisal emphasized the offender's humanity, and interpreted the transgression as evidence of the offender's need for positive transformation. Benefit-focused reappraisal emphasized insights gained or strengths shown in facing the offense. Supporting the manipulations, compassion-focused reappraisal stimulated the most empathy and forgiveness, whereas benefit-focused reappraisal prompted the most benefit language and gratitude. Both reappraisals decreased aroused, negative emotion, and related facial muscle tension at the brow (corrugator). Both reappraisals increased happiness and positive emotion in ratings and linguistic analyses. Compassion stimulated the greatest social language, calmed tension under the eye (orbicularis oculi), and slowed heart beats (R–R intervals). A focus on benefits prompted the greatest joy, stimulated smiling (zygomatic) activity, and buffered the parasympathetic nervous system against rumination's adverse effects on heart rate variability (HRV).