The relationship between irrational beliefs and forgiveness: The intermediate role of cognitive emotion regulation strategies

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between irrational beliefs, emotion regulation skills and forgiveness in adolescents, and to determine the level of influence of these variables in predicting forgiveness. The sample of study consist of a total of 982 high school students, of whom 539 (55%) are female and 443 (45%) are male, enrolled in five different public high schools in the Küçükçekmece district of İstanbul province during the 2022-2023 academic year. The research assessed adolescents forgiveness using the Forgiveness Scale for Adolescents (Asıcı & Karaca, 2018), their irrational beliefs using the Irrattional Beliefs Scale – Adolescents Form (Türküm, Balkaya & Karaca, 2005) and their emotion regulation skills using the Emotion Regulation Scale (Yurtsever, 2008; Aka, 2011). The data were analyzed using IBM SPSS 26.0 (Statistical Package fort he Social Sciences verion 26). Outliers that could violate the assumptions of normality and linearity were identified by examining the Mahalanobis distance values, and the outliers were removed from the dataset. Parametric techniques, such as Perarson's product-moment correlation coefficient and multiple linear regression analysis, were employed in the analyses. According to the results of the analyses, a significant positive relationship was found between forgiveness and irrational beliefs as well as the cognitive reappraisal subscale of emotion regulation. However, no significant relationship was found between forgiveness and the cognitive reappraisal subscale of emotion regulation, which were examined in this study, together accounted for 3% of forgiveness in asolescents. Keywords: Forgiveness, irrational beliefs, emotion regulation