Apology emerged in the accounts not as a formal or instrumental gesture but as a moral practice of acknowledgement, responsibility, and repair. Participants framed it as something owed to those harmed, tied to taking responsibility and showing respect. Forgiveness from others, by contrast, was perceived as uncertain, asymmetrical, and never guaranteed. Rather than being an automatic outcome of apology, it was often imagined as recognition that the person who caused harm is more than the offense itself.

A central tension ran through the interviews: participants wanted to be forgiven yet struggled to believe forgiveness could actually happen. The researchers link this gap between desire and disbelief to broader experiences of stigma and feelings of moral unworthiness among incarcerated people. Forgiveness, in this framing, functions less as an endpoint and more as an uncertain moral horizon that shapes identity and the possibility of change.

Within this sample, the analysis identified gendered emphases. Men more often discussed apology and forgiveness in relation to those they had harmed, responsibility, and respect, and their struggles with self-forgiveness were more often articulated through guilt and responsibility-taking. Women more often situated these processes within family, belonging, and identity, and their self-forgiveness struggles were more often expressed through shame and a sense of a flawed self.

The authors argue that these findings carry implications for rehabilitation, underscoring the importance of addressing apology, interpersonal forgiveness, and struggles over self-forgiveness in correctional settings, while recognizing that forgiveness from others may remain out of reach. By reconceptualizing forgiveness as an open-ended moral process rather than a fixed outcome, the study contributes to psychological and criminological understandings of desistance and identity change. As a qualitative study of 40 incarcerated individuals in Israel, the analysis reflects the perspectives of this particular group and the gendered emphases identified within it, rather than general population estimates.

Subject of Research: Apology, forgiveness from others, and self-forgiveness among incarcerated men and women in Israel

Article Title: “I wouldn’t forgive me”: apology, forgiveness from others, and self-forgiveness among incarcerated men and women

Article References: Peleg-Koriat, I., & Weimann-Saks, D. (2026). “I wouldn’t forgive me”: apology, forgiveness from others, and self-forgiveness among incarcerated men and women. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05843-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05843-1

Keywords: forgiveness, self-forgiveness, apology, incarceration, qualitative research, moral psychology, stigma, desistance, gender differences, rehabilitation, shame, guilt

Internal focalization is the literary device by which a narrative grants readers direct access to a character’s innermost thoughts and feelings. In the experimental story used by the research team, that access took the form of a repairman’s private regret over a careless act. Senior author Angus Fletcher, a professor of English at Ohio State’s Project Narrative, explained that being transported into a character’s mind elicits empathy toward that character and, in turn, forgiveness for the wrongdoing. Crucially, participants who were prompted to reflect on a past transgression of their own tended to extend their forgiveness of the fictional figure to the real-life event, suggesting the emotional shift generalizes beyond the page.

“If you just give people a story without the empathy technique, they’re not likely to forgive a character. But if you put the technique in, they not only forgive the character, but are then more likely to forgive other people in their actual life,” said Fletcher. The distinction matters because much of the previous research on literature and empathy has treated reading as a monolithic activity, comparing broad categories such as literary fiction versus nonfiction. By isolating a single, historically developed narrative technique, Fletcher and his co-author were able to test the mechanism itself rather than the genre label attached to it.

The study was completed with Mark Matthews, a recent Ohio State PhD graduate in social psychology. The collaboration brought together two disciplines that rarely share a laboratory bench: narrative theory, with its two-thousand-year history of claims about literature’s moral and emotional benefits, and experimental social psychology, with its insistence on controlled comparison and replication. That history of claims is long and venerable. Since antiquity, writers and philosophers have argued that literature helps people overcome anger, see situations from another person’s perspective, and function better socially, all of which are considered beneficial to mental health.

Modern science has tried to confirm those intuitions with mixed results. A widely cited 2013 study reported that reading passages of literary fiction, compared with nonfiction or popular fiction, enhanced readers’ ability to understand others’ beliefs and desires, a capacity psychologists call theory of mind. But subsequent efforts to replicate that finding, both by independent researchers and by the original team, did not pan out. Rather than abandon the question, Fletcher and Matthews reframed it. “We said, ‘What do we know about the history of how artists develop these techniques for creating empathy?’ We put the most powerful of those techniques into a story, and then tested whether that story without the technique creates empathy and if the story with the technique creates empathy,” Fletcher said. “By being more precise about it, we were able to identify these very specific mechanisms and connections.”

The experimental story itself was carefully constructed to provoke a genuine moral reaction. It follows a woman named Mary who, as a child, watched her puppy die after being hit by a car and swore off dog ownership for the rest of her life. At age 85, she finally adopts a puppy in an attempt to heal her lifelong grief, and she hires a repairman, warning him explicitly to keep the door shut so the dog cannot escape. He leaves the door open, and the puppy gets out, to Mary’s horror. Participants were then given different information about the act: in one version, the repairman disregarded Mary’s warning entirely, making the loss fully his fault; in another, he accidentally left the door open because he was distracted by personal problems at home.

The manipulation of internal focalization came next, and it was deliberately subtle. In the literary condition, the narrative reported the repairman’s private thought: “The repairman thought to himself, I wish I didn’t leave the door open.” In the nonliterary comparison condition, the same sentiment was spoken aloud: “The repairman said to Mary, ‘I wish I didn’t leave the door open.'” The propositional content of the two sentences is identical; what differs is whether the reader is given privileged access to the character’s inner world or merely observes an external utterance that could be insincere. That single difference in narrative perspective proved powerful enough to change how participants judged and forgave the character.

Across three studies involving a total of 1,563 people, Fletcher and Matthews found that forgiveness of a fictional character could be reliably promoted through internal focalization, and that facilitating forgiveness of the fictional transgression in turn brought about forgiveness of real-life transgressions. Because of how the study was designed, the fictional forgiveness had to occur first, establishing a causal sequence in which empathy for a character opens a pathway toward empathy for actual people. The researchers also deliberately omitted any detail about whether Mary forgave the repairman, so that participants never learned the outcome and the effect could not be attributed to the story simply modeling forgiving behavior for readers to imitate.

The researchers emphasize that the pathway to forgiveness runs through outrage, not around it. Before forgiveness becomes possible, readers must first feel a genuine sense of indignation at the repairman’s apparent callousness about keeping the dog safe. Matthews also draws a technical distinction between two forms of forgiveness that psychologists differentiate: decisional forgiveness, the behavioral choice to forgo resentment, and emotional forgiveness, the deeper restoration of warmth and closeness in a relationship. “Once we know the transgression is someone’s fault, what we discover is that if we can create a condition where you can see the internal remorse, the internal world of the person, people can feel the sincerity of it. They can open up and connect with the emotions that person is having,” Matthews said. “As a result, now we have the opportunity to forgive them more.” Notably, both types of forgiveness, decisional and emotional, were elicited by the literary technique, both toward the fictional character and toward real-life offenders.

The implications extend well beyond literary theory. Gallup research has found that more than one in five people worldwide routinely feel angry, a figure Fletcher cites as evidence that stories may serve as a kind of prescription for better emotional health. “What’s really great about literature is you don’t have to be at a crisis point to use it,” he said. “It’s something that you can just use a little bit to help get you through daily anger, daily depression, daily pessimism, daily anxiety. The right literature, once you learn how to use it, can help pop you out of that, can give you more joy, more optimism, more love, more empathy, all of these positive effects.” The effect, he added, is not restricted to the written word; people often report being more in tune with their emotions while watching a film or reading a novel than in ordinary life, which he sees as a clue to a much larger phenomenon. In his view, the study captures one instance of an emotional health crisis driven by spending too much time with technology and too little with what he calls ancient sources of human wisdom. The core hope, as Matthews put it, is that exposure to literature changes our perception of the world around us. “That’s the hope. That’s the goal,” he said. “And in our study, we wanted to approximate that.” The work was supported by Ohio State’s Department of English.

Subject of Research: How the literary technique of internal focalization promotes empathy and forgiveness of real-life transgressions

Article Title: How literature can inspire us to forgive

Article References: How literature can inspire us to forgive. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: internal focalization, forgiveness, empathy, literature, psychology, narrative technique, theory of mind, emotional health, Ohio State University, Frontiers in Psychology, decisional forgiveness, emotional forgiveness

The research team, led by Lütfiye Nur Uzun and Hümeyra Hançer Tok of the Department of Nursing at Sivas Cumhuriyet University’s Suşehri School of Health, recruited 80 fourth-year nursing students from a university in eastern Türkiye. Fourth-year students were a deliberate choice: by this stage of training they have accumulated enough real clinical experience to have genuine difficult patient encounters to draw upon, yet they remain at a formative point in their professional identity. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two parallel groups of 40 students each. One group received forgiveness education delivered through creative drama, an experiential technique rooted in applied theatre in which participants improvise, role-play, and embody perspectives other than their own. The other group received the same core content through case-based learning, in which written clinical scenarios are analyzed and discussed in a more traditional cognitive framework.

The intervention was compact by design. Both groups completed four educational sessions totaling 200 minutes, a format chosen to fit within the crowded final-year curriculum. What distinguished the two arms was not the quantity of instruction but the mode of engagement. In the creative drama group, students physically and emotionally inhabited scenarios involving difficult patient behavior, taking on the roles of patients, nurses, and bystanders, and exploring the motivations and inner states that drive hostile interactions on the ward. In the case-based group, students worked through comparable scenarios intellectually, dissecting causes, consequences, and coping strategies through guided discussion. The underlying hypothesis was that forgiveness, being fundamentally an emotional and relational process, might be better cultivated through embodied experience than through analysis alone.

To measure the outcome, the researchers used two validated psychometric instruments: the Forgiveness of Others Scale and the Self-Forgiveness Scale, administered before and after the intervention. The statistical analysis was appropriately rigorous for a randomized design, employing independent-samples t-tests, paired-samples t-tests, analysis of covariance, and the non-parametric Mann–Whitney U and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests where the data demanded them. Crucially, the team used ANCOVA to control for baseline differences in forgiveness scores, a step that strengthens causal inference by adjusting for whatever forgiveness tendencies students carried into the trial. The study was retrospectively registered on ClinicalTrials.gov under registration number NCT07670481, and ethical approval was granted by the Bolu Abant Izzet Baysal University Human Research Ethics Committee in Social Sciences, with the trial conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

The headline result is striking. Both educational approaches significantly increased students’ forgiveness of others, with p-values below 0.001, confirming that forgiveness is not a fixed personality trait but a trainable skill that responds to structured instruction. But when baseline scores were controlled for, the creative drama group pulled clearly ahead. Posttest forgiveness of others scores were significantly higher in the drama arm than in the case-based arm, with F(1, 77) = 12.899, p = 0.001, and a partial eta-squared of 0.143, a medium-to-large between-group effect. Within-group comparisons told an even more vivid story: the creative drama intervention produced a very large effect size of Cohen’s d = 1.42, while case-based learning produced a large effect of d = 1.00. In practical terms, students who had acted out the emotional architecture of a difficult encounter forgave more readily than students who had merely analyzed it.

The self-forgiveness results, however, were a sobering counterpoint. Neither the drama nor the case-based approach produced a statistically significant change in students’ Self-Forgiveness Scale scores. This asymmetry is theoretically meaningful. Forgiving others and forgiving oneself are psychologically distinct processes, and the researchers’ findings suggest that a 200-minute group intervention, however immersive, may not be sufficient to shift how students relate to their own perceived failures and shortcomings. Self-forgiveness often involves confronting guilt, shame, and self-criticism at a depth that classroom formats may not reach, and it may require longer timeframes, individualized support, or clinical supervision structures that sit outside the scope of a curriculum module.

Why would drama outperform case-based learning for forgiveness of others? The answer likely lies in the mechanics of experiential cognition. When a student plays an angry, frightened patient, she must generate that character’s inner world from the inside: the fear that curdles into aggression, the loss of control that expresses itself as contempt for caregivers. Perspective-taking of this embodied kind engages empathy circuits and emotional memory in ways that reading a case summary cannot. Forgiveness research across psychology has long emphasized that letting go of resentment requires genuinely grasping the offender’s humanity and circumstances. Creative drama operationalizes that insight directly, converting an abstract moral prescription into a lived, felt experience. Case-based learning, by contrast, keeps the learner at an analytical distance, which builds knowledge but may not transform emotional response.

The clinical implications extend well beyond a single Turkish nursing school. Burnout, compassion fatigue, and turnover among nurses are persistent global problems, and difficult patient interactions are among their most corrosive daily drivers. If unresolved anger toward patients accumulates, it degrades the therapeutic relationship, erodes job satisfaction, and can ultimately push skilled clinicians out of the profession. A brief, low-cost, evidence-based forgiveness module that measurably increases students’ capacity to release resentment offers nursing programs a practical preventive tool. The fact that the entire intervention fit into four sessions makes adoption feasible even in packed curricula, and the use of open-access published protocols and validated scales makes replication straightforward for research teams elsewhere.

There are, of course, limits to what one trial can establish. The sample was drawn from a single institution, all participants were fourth-year students at one university, and the outcomes were measured immediately after the intervention rather than at long-term follow-up, leaving open the question of whether the gains persist as students enter the workforce. The trial was also retrospectively registered, a methodological wrinkle that transparency-minded readers will note. Self-report scales, moreover, capture students’ own perceptions of their forgiveness, which may diverge from behavior in actual charged encounters. Future studies with longitudinal follow-up, behavioral outcome measures, and multi-site samples would considerably strengthen the evidence base.

Even with those caveats, the study adds a compelling data point to a growing movement in health professions education that treats emotional competence as a teachable clinical skill rather than an innate disposition. The image of nursing students rehearsing forgiveness by stepping into the role of the very patients who wound them is a vivid one, and the numbers behind it are hard to dismiss: a very large within-group effect, a significant advantage over an already-effective comparison method, and a clean randomized design. As health systems worldwide grapple with workforce attrition and the human costs of caregiving, the lesson from Sivas may be that some of the most important clinical training happens not at the bedside, but in the improvised, uncomfortable, and ultimately transformative act of playing someone else’s pain.

Subject of Research: Forgiveness education interventions for nursing students managing difficult patient encounters

Article Title: Creative drama and case-based learning for forgiveness education in difficult patient encounters among nursing students: a randomized controlled trial

Article References: Uzun, L. N., & Tok, H. H. (2026). Creative drama and case-based learning for forgiveness education in difficult patient encounters among nursing students: a randomized controlled trial. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10590-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10590-3

Keywords: forgiveness, nursing education, creative drama, case-based learning, difficult patients, randomized controlled trial, nursing students, self-forgiveness, experiential learning, medical education, BMC Medical Education, Türkiye

The study, led by Claudia Chiarolanza of Sapienza University of Rome together with Stefano Isolani of Guglielmo Marconi University and Danilo Garcia of the University of Stavanger, drew its inspiration from Greek mythology. Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, embodied the outrage that follows perceived violations—a fitting metaphor, the authors argue, for the emotional and social forces that swirl around revenge in romantic relationships. Betrayal within a couple is not merely a private wound; it is a violation of a relational contract, and the response it elicits carries both private and public dimensions. The researchers set out to test whether the perceived legitimacy of a vengeful act depends jointly on the sex of the avenger and the visibility of the act itself.

To do so, the team designed a controlled 2 × 2 factorial experiment. Each of the 908 participants, all Italian adults recruited through social networks and community circles, was randomly assigned to read one of four scenarios depicting a marital betrayal and a subsequent act of revenge. The scenarios varied the sex of the avenger—male or female—and the context of the retaliation—public or private. In the public conditions, the vengeful act unfolded before an audience: one male avenger posted about his wife’s affair in a town’s Facebook group, while one female avenger publicly humiliated her husband and his lover at a company dinner. In the private conditions, the retaliation was directed at the partner alone, such as a message to a small WhatsApp group or throwing a spouse’s belongings out the window. Participants rated how plausible they found each scenario and how likely they would be to act as the avenger did, on five-point scales.

The design was carefully controlled. An a priori power analysis had indicated that at least 299 participants would be needed to detect a medium effect with 90 percent power; the final sample far exceeded that threshold. Randomization checks confirmed that the four groups did not differ in age, education, relationship status, or any of the psychological variables measured. The researchers also collected data on participants’ own sex, mental well-being, impulsivity, dispositional forgiveness, and dispositional vengeance, using well-validated instruments including the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale, the Bolton Forgiveness Scale, the Vengeance Scale, and the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale. Internal consistency was acceptable to excellent across all measures, with the Vengeance Scale reaching a McDonald’s omega of 0.91. All analyses employed robust standard errors and bootstrap estimation with 5,000 samples to guard against violations of normality.

The results on perceived plausibility were subtle but telling. Neither the avenger’s sex nor the context alone significantly shaped how believable participants found the scenario. Instead, the two factors interacted: in public settings, scenarios featuring a female avenger were rated as more plausible than those featuring a male avenger, with a statistically significant difference corresponding to a small effect size (partial eta-squared of 0.008). In private settings, no such difference emerged. The Female/Public condition received the highest mean plausibility rating of 3.48, while the Female/Private condition received the lowest at 3.18. The authors caution that this interaction, though significant, represents a modest variation in social perception rather than a dramatic practical effect.

The picture changed dramatically when participants were asked whether they themselves would act as the avenger did. Here the overall model explained a substantial 20 percent of the variance, and a large main effect of the avenger’s sex emerged: female-avenger scenarios received markedly higher endorsement than male-avenger scenarios in both contexts. Crucially, the gap widened when the act was public. In the public condition, the difference between female and male avengers corresponded to a large effect (d = 0.91), nearly double the moderate effect observed in the private condition (d = 0.44). Descriptively, the Female/Public condition again topped the ratings at a mean of 2.61, while the Male/Public condition sank to the bottom at 1.42. In other words, participants were most willing to imagine themselves taking public revenge as women, and least willing to do so as men.

Perhaps the most important finding is that this pattern survived statistical adjustment. When the researchers re-ran the model controlling for perceived plausibility, participants’ own sex, well-being, impulsivity, forgiveness, and vengeance, the avenger’s sex by context interaction remained significant, with effect magnitudes essentially unchanged. Among the covariates, dispositional vengeance, perceived plausibility, and impulsivity each predicted endorsement, whereas participants’ own sex, well-being, and forgiveness did not. This persistence indicates that the contextual and gendered contribution to vengeance endorsement is not reducible to stable individual differences. Something about the situation itself—who acts and who watches—shapes how acceptable revenge appears, above and beyond the psychological profiles of the people doing the judging.

The authors interpret these results through a communicative-signaling framework. Drawing on work by Boon and Yoshimura, they argue that a vengeful act simultaneously delivers three messages: that an injury has occurred, that the avenger is willing to defend their standing, and that future violations will carry a cost. When the act is enacted before others, this signal becomes more legible and more consequential, because the audience to whom it is implicitly addressed expands. Social media platforms amplify this dynamic further, extending the reach of a retaliatory act far beyond the immediate circles of the avenger and the target. On this view, the public versus private context of revenge is not a peripheral detail but part of what the act means—and the finding that visibility amplifies the difference between female and male avengers suggests that gendered expectations about who may legitimately perform retribution in front of others are woven into those signals.

The study is not without limitations, which the authors acknowledge candidly. The convenience sample was recruited in Italy, limiting generalizability to other cultures; the study lacked a formal manipulation check confirming that participants interpreted the public and private conditions as intended; it was not preregistered; and written scenarios may not capture the emotional intensity of real betrayal. The researchers also note an ethical concern: the scenarios may inadvertently reinforce stereotypical portrayals of the sexes, and future work should incorporate counter-stereotypical narratives and direct measures of gender identity and gender norm endorsement. Still, the practical implications are tangible. Because impulsivity predicted vengeance endorsement, clinical conversations about betrayal may benefit from attention to emotion-regulation strategies of the kind used in cognitive-behavioral interventions. And because the visibility of a vengeful act shaped its acceptability, therapists may want to explore how clients construe the audience and reputational dimensions of their own potential responses to infidelity.

What Project Nemesis ultimately offers is a reframing of one of humanity’s oldest impulses. Revenge, the study suggests, is not simply retaliation—a raw discharge of hurt. It is a socially embedded, communicative process that depends on who enacts it, who witnesses it, and the gendered expectations that surround both. The perceived plausibility and endorsement of vengeful acts arise from the joint contribution of situational cues and dispositional tendencies, consistent with a biopsychosocial model in which fast, emotionally driven reactions are tempered by slower, intentional character processes. As the authors conclude, perceptions of vengeance are not purely reactive but reflect the dynamic interplay of personal characteristics, social context, and the audience to whom the act is, at least implicitly, addressed. In an era when a single post can broadcast a betrayal to thousands, understanding how visibility and gender shape the social calculus of revenge has never felt more urgent.

Subject of Research: Gender and context effects on the perceived plausibility and endorsement of vengeful behavior after relational transgressions

Article Title: Project Nemesis: vindictive behavior in public and private contexts

Article References: Chiarolanza, C., Isolani, S., & Garcia, D. (2026). Project Nemesis: vindictive behavior in public and private contexts. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1545. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10082-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10082-z

Keywords: vengeance, revenge, relational transgressions, infidelity, forgiveness, gender differences, public and private contexts, social signaling, impulsivity, social psychology, Project Nemesis, Current Psychology