Self-forgiveness has been conceptualized as a coping strategy that may improve health and well-being. To better understand the functions of self-forgiveness, this meta-analysis examines the correlates of self-forgiveness associated with physical and mental health. For physical health, across 18 samples and 5,653 participants, the correlation was .32. For psychological well-being, across 65 samples and 17,939 participants, the correlation was .45. To augment this primary focus on physical and mental health correlates, we estimated the relationships between self-forgiveness and specific mental health constructs and relationship outcomes. Implications for future basic and applied research on self-forgiveness are discussed.
How perspective-taking ability changes with age (i.e., whether older adults are better at understanding others' behaviors and intentions and show greater empathy to others or not) is not clear, with prior empirical findings on this phenomenon yielding mixed results. In a series of experiments, we investigated the phenomenon from a motivational perspective. Perceived closeness between participants and the experimenter (Study 1) or the target in an emotion recognition task (Study 2) was manipulated to examine whether the closeness could influence participants' performance in faux pas recognition (Study 1) and emotion recognition (Study 2). It was found that the well-documented negative age effect (i.e., older adults performed worse than younger adults in faux pas and emotion recognition tasks) was only replicated in the control condition for both tasks. When closeness was experimentally increased, older adults enhanced their performance, and they now performed at a comparable level as younger adults. Findings from the 2 experiments suggest that the reported poorer performance of older adults in perspective-taking tasks might be attributable to a lack of motivation instead of ability to perform in laboratory settings. With the presence of strong motivation, older adults have the ability to perform equally well as younger adults.
This study investigated the link between exposure to violence and psychosocial adjustment for 442 Chinese secondary school students in Form 1-3. The students completed an inventory assessing exposure to violence through witnessing and through direct victimization in different settings (community, school, and home). Multiple measures and informants (i.e., self-report, teacher report, and school report) were used to assess emotional, behavioral, and cognitive functioning in adolescents. The results of this study showed that overall exposure to violence was related to emotional and behavior problems. High rates of exposure to violence across multiple contexts were found in this sample. After controlling for the co-occurrence of risk factors (e.g., exposure to violence in other settings), both witnessing school violence and being victimized by domestic violence were associated with emotional problems, whereas being victimized by community violence was related to behavior problems. These results suggest that there are differential effects of risks associated with different forms and settings of exposure.
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