The affect of mood and sex similarity on forgiveness

This study examines the effect of mood and gender similarity on forgiveness. As a result of the literature review, it was predicted that individuals with positive mood would be more forgiving in the face of unkind behaviour compared to individuals with negative mood and that individuals would be more forgiving in the face of unkind behaviour compared to their opposite sex. For this purpose, 3 separate studies with methodological differences were conducted. In all three studies, participants were randomly assigned to 4 different conditions selected by convenience sampling from a university in the Southeastern Anatolia region. The findings of the first study conducted with 172 participants contradicted the hypotheses; neighter mood nor gender similarity had significant effect on forgiveness. In the second study, the limitations identified in the first study were removed and the study was repeated. The second study was applied to 380 participants and the same findings were obtained with the first study. In the third study, the limitations identified in the second study were removed and applied to 70 participants. The findings of the third study show that mood has a significant effect on gender similarity. The forgiveness scores of the participants with positive mood (M= 5.26) were higher than the forgiveness scores of the participants with negative mood (M=3.65). The findings of the third study show that gender similarity does not have a significant effect on forgiveness in line with the first two studies. Eventually, the findings are discussed with the theories and studies in the literatüre. KEYWORDS: Forgiveness, Positive Mood, Negative Mood, Gender Similarity.