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Phenomenological and physiological differences between forgiven and not forgiven remembered wrongdoings in samples from Colombia and the United States

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Gabriela Fernández-Miranda¹ (), Leonard Faul², Santiago Amaya³, Pablo Abitbol⁴, Kevin Labar¹, Felipe De Brigard¹; ¹Duke University, ²Boston College, ³Rice University, ⁴Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar

Forgiveness is a valuable tool for overcoming negative emotions and healing relationships after interpersonal conflict. Recent evidence suggests that forgiving involves a process of emotional fading, such that remembering wrongdoings is experienced with decreased affective responses, while the episodic details of the memory are not forgotten. To evaluate the role that severity plays in the recollective experience, we collected self-report ratings and psychophysiological measures with a sample of undergraduate students in the United States and a sample of victims of severe war crimes in Colombia. In a within-subject design, we evaluated emotional responses and the retrieval of episodic details of remembered wrongdoings as a function of forgiveness. Participants silently recalled two neutral-positive memories and two memories of wrongdoings while we measured electrodermal activity, as well as corrugator and zygomaticus electromyography. We also assessed participants’ recollective experiences and degree of forgiveness toward the perpetrators. Consistent with the emotional fading view of forgiveness, memories with high ratings of forgiveness were associated with less negativity during recall for both the US and Colombian samples. Importantly, we found no differences in the recollection of episodic details. Interestingly, higher forgiveness for negative memories was associated with strong activation of the corrugator (marker of negative valence) during initial recall, followed by a decrease during elaboration, suggesting a possible emotion regulation process. We discuss the implications of these findings for existing psychological theories of forgiveness and suggest possible memory mechanisms that involve an underlying process of emotional reappraisal of the memories of wrongdoings.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions