The following studies are currently being conducted by the members of the team.

We are not soliciting participants for these projects through this website. Please see the Brock University Psychology Department Research Website for information about participation in current studies.

Reactions to Transgressions.

Researchers: Leanne Gosse, Jessica Rourke, Kathryn Belicki, and Carolyn Hafer.

We are examining the roles, if any, that the desire to make a good impression (i.e. impression management) and the desire to restore justice (justice concerns), both separately and in interaction, have in predicting confession following a transgression. In order to study these two motives, we have designed two scenarios which describe situations in which threat to impression management and a threat to justice are manipulated and the participants will be asked to provide their reactions to the situations by taking the perspective of the transgressor.

Forgiveness Consistency and its Relation to Personality Variables.

Researchers: Steven Shepherd and Kathryn Belicki.

Following the methodology of Bem (1974), this study is looking at forgiveness as a trait that is not utilized consistently across situations by all individuals. Instead, individuals may vary in how much they rely on the situation in determining whether or not they will forgive. This study is investigating the usefulness of various measures in predicting trait forgiveness in this context, and is also examining whether excluding high-variability participants will increase the correlations between forgiveness and various personality variables.

Factors Involved in Forgiveness.

Researchers: Brandy Doan and Nancy DeCourville.

Previous research on forgiveness suggests that forgiveness consists of an affective transformation of negative affect, cognitions and behaviour to positive or neutral cognitions, affect and behaviour. We are investigating the extent to which affect actually changes from negative to positive or neutral when people say they forgiven someone who has hurt them. This study will focus on the idea of affective transformation in forgivnesss, and whether or not complete affective transformation occurs. We will explore (1) if individuals who engage in self-reflective and insightful cognitive styles will report less negative affect, and (2) whether the absence of negative affect will predict higher levels of forgiveness toward the offender. Affect will be measured through explicit self reports and with an implicit projective computer task. We hypothesize that individuals who engage in self-reflective and insightful thinking styles will show higher congruance between implicit and explicit affect, as well as increased levels of forgiveness.