Scientists shed light on how forgiveness does and doesn’t reshape memories

A new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General provides insight into how forgiveness affects memory. The researchers found that forgiving someone who has wronged you does not blur or alter the details of the event in memory. Instead, it changes how you feel about it. People who have forgiven a past offense still remember what happened with the same clarity, but their emotional response when recalling the event is less intense and less negative.

The researchers were interested in understanding what actually changes in the mind when someone forgives a wrongdoing. While many theories suggest that forgiveness helps repair relationships by altering how we feel about a transgression, there has been debate over whether these changes stem from emotional shifts or from changes in memory itself. In other words, does forgiveness help us feel better because we no longer remember the incident clearly, or do we simply feel differently about what we still clearly recall?

To answer this question, the researchers set out to compare two competing explanations. One, called the “episodic fading” account, suggests that when we forgive someone, we stop thinking about the transgression as much. As a result, the memory becomes less vivid and detailed over time. This weakening of the memory, the theory proposes, reduces the emotional charge of the experience. The other theory, the “emotional fading” account, argues that forgiveness doesn’t affect the accuracy or detail of the memory at all. Instead, it allows people to reframe the event emotionally, changing how they feel about it without losing any factual content.

“What got me inspired to study forgiveness was knowing that victims of terrible crimes in the context of the armed conflict in Colombia forgave the perpetrators of various transgressions, such as forced displacement, homicides, massacres, and other atrocities,” said study author Gabriela Fernández-Miranda, a Ph.D. candidate in the Imagination and Modal Cognition Lab at Duke University.

“How is it that they are able to forgive such terrible offenses, when for me and others around me, forgiving less severe wrongs is often difficult? This led me to try to understand how our memories and emotions change when we forgive, and the cognitive mechanisms behind these changes”

The research team conducted four separate studies involving nearly 1,500 participants. In each study, participants were asked to recall real-life instances in which they were wronged, either by someone they later forgave or did not forgive. After describing these events, participants rated various aspects of their memory—how detailed and vivid it was, how they felt about the event when it happened, and how they felt when recalling it during the study.

In the first two studies, participants completed a standardized questionnaire that measured both the episodic qualities of their memory (such as vividness, sensory detail, and spatial arrangement) and its emotional characteristics (such as emotional intensity and positivity or negativity of the memory).

Across both studies, participants who had forgiven the person who wronged them consistently reported less emotional distress when remembering the event. They described their current feelings about the memory as less negative and intense. However, there was no significant difference between forgiven and unforgiven memories in terms of their clarity or detail. The events were remembered just as vividly, whether or not the perpetrator had been forgiven.

These results were consistent across multiple measures and held even after accounting for the perceived moral wrongness of the act. In other words, the reduced emotional intensity of forgiven memories was not because the wrongdoing seemed less serious in retrospect. Instead, the emotional transformation appeared to occur during the act of remembering itself—people still thought the wrongdoing was wrong, but they no longer felt as angry or hurt when recalling it.

“Some theoretical perspectives, which we present as the episodic fading account, argue that not forgiving is related to higher levels of rumination and leads to forgetting forgiven wrongdoings,” Fernández-Miranda told PsyPost. “Intuitively, it makes sense to expect that we ruminate more upon not forgiven wrongdoings than forgiven ones. From the beginning we expected to find that participants were not going to forget wrongdoings, but it was also interesting to find that there are no differences in how often people thought or talked about the wrongdoing, whether forgiven and not, further suggesting that rumination is not the mechanism underlying forgiveness, as the episodic fading account suggests.”

In a third study, the researchers expanded the analysis by asking participants to recall events in which they were not only victims, but also events in which they were the perpetrators. This allowed the team to investigate whether being forgiven by someone else also changed how the event was remembered. The results were largely similar. Whether someone had forgiven or been forgiven, the emotional tone of the memory during recall was more neutral and less intense if forgiveness had occurred. But again, the memory itself—the details, clarity, and content—remained unchanged.

A fourth and final study focused on how forgiveness-related emotional shifts influenced people’s attitudes toward the wrongdoer. Participants who forgave their offender reported lower desires for revenge and avoidance, and higher feelings of goodwill. These forgiving attitudes were strongly associated with how participants felt about the memory when recalling it, not how they remembered feeling at the time the event occurred. The researchers also found that the intensity and negativity of the emotions experienced during recall were linked to lower levels of benevolence and greater desire for revenge.

This study strengthens the idea that forgiveness does not involve forgetting or diminishing the facts of a hurtful event. Instead, it appears to be a psychological process that transforms our emotional reaction to those memories. When people say they “forgive but don’t forget,” this research suggests they are being quite literal: the memory remains, but the emotional pain fades.

One interesting and consistent finding across the studies was that participants rated forgiven wrongdoings as slightly less morally wrong than those they had not forgiven. Although all remembered events were considered morally problematic, people seemed to reevaluate their judgments slightly after forgiveness. This could reflect a kind of emotional compromise—perhaps softening moral evaluations helps facilitate reconciliation.

“Forgiving is not about forgetting a wrongdoing; we remember forgiven and not forgiven wrongs equally well,” Fernández-Miranda explained. “Our main finding is that our memories of forgiven wrongdoings, relative to not forgiven ones, change in their emotional characteristics, such that recalling the episodic memory of the specific wrong does not elicit the same emotional responses in the present as it did in the past. However, the wrongdoing is still remembered! That is what we call the emotional fading account of the relationship between memory and forgiveness.”

While the findings offer strong support for the emotional fading theory, the authors acknowledge some limitations. All data were collected from online participants in Western countries, which may limit how broadly the results can be applied. The studies also relied on retrospective self-reports rather than tracking forgiveness and memory over time. The researchers suggest that future work should include more diverse populations and use longitudinal designs to better understand how forgiveness unfolds.

“The major limitation of the studies presented in this paper has to do with the limited range of transgressions from online samples, who are located mostly in the United States,” Fernández-Miranda noted. “The most common wrongdoings are fights between friends or coworkers, and infidelity. However, we need to see if these results replicate for more severe transgressions.”

“My long-term goals involve conducting research to understand how we remember memories of wrongdoings, including a broader range of transgressions, with diverse samples, and in more naturalistic settings,” she added. “To that end, we have been carrying out studies in the United States and in Colombia using both lab-based methods and methods outside of the lab. While in the United States we work with students and community members in Durham, North Carolina, in Colombia we work with victims of political violence who have experienced severe transgressions such as forced displacement, homicides, threats, torture, sexual violence, etc. Part of the research is conducted outside the lab in naturalistic settings. This has presented us with several theoretical, methodological, and ethical challenges. I am very excited about our findings and about sharing all we have learned by conducting cognitive research in the field!”

The study, “The Emotional Impact of Forgiveness on Autobiographical Memories of Past Wrongdoings,” was authored by Gabriela Fernández-Miranda, Matthew Stanley, Samuel Murray, Leonard Faul, and Felipe De Brigard.