1. Forgiveness weakens women's counter-empathy both in the stage of self-oriented and other-oriented emotional responses.
- Author
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Yu, Meiqi, Lu, Jiamei, Li, Xu, Wang, Shuyin, Shangguan, Chenyu, and Wang, Xia
- Subjects
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EMPATHY , *FORGIVENESS , *STATISTICAL power analysis , *SCALE analysis (Psychology) , *SELF-evaluation , *MENTAL health , *T-test (Statistics) , *CRIMINALS , *PSYCHOLOGY of women , *EMOTIONS , *DESCRIPTIVE statistics , *WORLD health , *PSYCHOLOGY of college students , *COLLEGE students , *TEXT messages , *INTERPERSONAL relations , *FACIAL expression , *FRIENDSHIP - Abstract
Counter-empathy may have more serious negative effects on women than on men. Sixty-four female Chinese university students participated in this study. Based on the counter-empathy model in a competitive setting, we examined how forgiveness affects counter-empathy. We manipulated the degree of participants' forgiveness toward their opponents by changing the type of information they received from their opponents. We also measured counter-empathy through self-reported pleasantness caused by opponents' facial expressions (smiles or frowns). We found that forgiveness can effectively alleviate women's counter-empathy, restraining their emotional experience from being inconsistent with the offender and enhancing their empathic concern toward the offender. We preliminarily explored how forgiveness works on counter-empathy and provided insight into the use of forgiveness to maintain global women's emotional health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
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