How Can Publishers Support the Authors of Trauma Memoirs As They Unpack Their Pain for the Public?

[Extract] Would you publish the worst thing that ever happened to you? When Amani Haydar’s mother was murdered by her father in an act of domestic violence, writing helped process the pain. At first, she wrote in private, journalling as a way “to express frustrations and insecurities I feared couldn’t be spoken out loud at the time”

Truth Knowing & Psychological Closure

Victims of crime often want the truth about what happened. But, how exactly is truth valuable? Commonly, truth is thought to be instrumentally valuable by providing useful knowledge. Truth would be beneficial for victims because specific information may afford re-appraisals or greater understanding/meaning. The present research shows that truth may have intrinsic value independent from information content by providing a meta-cognitive feeling of truth knowing, which facilitates closure. In Study 1 (N = 200) and Study 2 (N = 195), participants imagined themselves as victims of crime and were presented with one of two reports identical in content but designed to appear either complete or incomplete. As predicted, the complete report increased truth knowing and not understanding. Truth knowing was associated with greater closure, reduced negative affect, and greater forgiveness. In Study 3 (N = 157), participants were victims of real crimes and responded to one of two sets of questions making salient either the completeness or incompleteness of the information available to them about the crime. Salience of the completeness of information increased truth knowing, increased closure, reduced anger, and was associated with greater forgiveness. Findings suggest a subjective sense of truth knowing may facilitate the recovery of victims independently from instrumental value derived from content

Wenzel et al. (2021) Dynamics of moral repair - Forgiveness, self-forgiveness, and the restoration of value consensus as interdependent processes

Most psychological research has investigated victims’ forgiveness and offenders’ self-forgiveness separately, ignoring interactive and dynamic processes between them. We suggest that both parties are interdependent in their attempts to revalidate the values violated by the wrongdoing. In the present study, both partners of close relationships dyads (including 164 complete couples) were surveyed over three time-points following the report of a wrongdoing by one of the partners. Latent growth modelling showed that victims’ forgiveness was associated with growth in their perception of a value consensus with the offender. Victims’ value consensus perception was associated with growth in offenders’ perception of value consensus and engagement in genuine self-forgiveness (working through). However, directly, forgiveness was associated with decline in offenders’ genuine self-forgiveness, while offenders’ self-punitiveness was associated with decline in victims’ forgiveness. The findings highlight the regulatory function of victim forgiveness and the pivotal role of restoring value consensus in interactive moral repair

Wenzel et al. (2023) Does victims' forgiveness help offenders to forgive themselves? The role of meta-perceptions of value consensus.

Interpersonal transgressions are disruptive to relationships as they violate values presumed to be shared and threaten the integrity of victim and offender, and their shared identity. Forgiveness and self-forgiveness are understood to be important elements of the moral repair process, however commonly they are studied as intrapsychic phenomena without considering the dynamics between them. Here, we investigate whether victims’ expression of forgiveness can facilitate offenders’ genuine self-forgiveness – the restoration of the offender’s moral self by taking responsibility and working through their guilt. We argue that forgiveness can do so when it leads offenders to perceive that the victim believes the offender shares in a consensus about the violated values (meta-perceived value consensus) and, in turn, leads offenders to affirm their perception of value consensus. Three experimental studies (N = 807, 606, and 752) provided evidence for the hypothesized sequential mediation, with forgiveness having an indirect positive effect on genuine self-forgiveness via meta-perception of value consensus and offender’s affirmation of value consensus. Study 2 furthermore manipulated the victim’s belief in the offender sharing in the value consensus and provided causal evidence for its role in the process. The findings highlight the importance of a restored value consensus for the offender’s repair of integrity through genuine self-forgiveness, which depends on the offender knowing, and knowing that the victim knows, that they share those values. The research advances our understanding of moral repair as a dyadic negotiated process

Woodyatt et al. (2022) Interpersonal transgressions and psychological loss: Understanding moral repair as dyadic, reciprocal, and interactionist

Following interpersonal transgressions, both victim and offender can experience psychological loss due to threatened needs for agency and moral-social identity. Moral repair is the process by which these losses are restored. Rather than involving only intra-individual static processes, research is starting to recognize that moral repair is dyadic, reciprocal, and interactionist. It involves the victim and offender co-engaging with one another, reciprocally responding to the other’s psychological needs, and co-constructing a shared understanding of what has occurred, their relationship, and a way forward. Each of these steps represents periods of vulnerability where the losses of a transgression can be repaired - or exacerbated

Effects of expressed forgiveness on offender self-forgiveness via value consensus perceptions

This research investigates the effects of a victim’s expression of forgiveness on the offender’s self-forgiveness, sequentially mediated via the offender’s meta-perception that the victim believes in a value consensus shared with the offender, and the offender’s affirmation of their own belief in a value consensus with the victim

Communicative Function of Self-Punishment

Self-punishment, the adverse treatment of the self as a response to own wrongdoing, seems dysfunctional on first sight. However, it may have interpersonal benefits, as it may affect how others perceive the offender. We argue that self-punishment communicates the offender’s reaffirmation of the violated values as well as their own status degradation. Consequently, observers may attribute more remorse to the offender who self-punish, which in turn may increase their willingness to reconcile with the offender. Four studies conducted in the US and Germany (Ns = 285, 609, 648 and 603) tested these predicted processes experimentally by crossing self-punishment with an explicit message of either value restoration or status degradation from the offender. We employed a measurement-of-process as well as a moderation-of-process approach to investigate the processes underlying the attribution of remorse. The results consistently showed that, in the absence of an explicit message, self-punishment increased third parties’ attribution of remorse to the offender, but not (or less so) when offenders issued either explicit message. Both explicit messages increased remorse attributions, but this was not further enhanced by self-punishment. This pattern of redundancy implies that self-punishment and messages of value restoration and status degradation are interchangeable in their effects on remorse perceptions. These findings indicate that self-punishment communicates value reaffirmation and status degradation, and through these mechanisms increases remorse perceptions that are linked to third parties’ willingness to reconcile with the offender. The findings provide experimental evidence for a communicative function of self-punishment that may facilitate the restoration of jeopardized relationships

The social psychology of whistleblowing: an integrated model

Whistleblowing is the disclosure of ingroup wrongdoing to an external agency and can have important functions for the regulation of moral and legal conduct. Organizational research has focused largely on the impact of individual and organizational factors, while overlooking the role of group memberships and associated social identities. Further, social psychologists have so far paid little attention to this phenomenon, or else have tended to subsume it within analysis of dissent. To address these lacunae, we present a psychological model of whistleblowing that draws on social identity theorizing (after Tajfel & Turner, 1979). This model describes when and how social identities and different forms of power motivate group members to respond to ingroup wrongdoing by engaging in whistleblowing. Our review of the literature points to the model’s ability to integrate existing evidence while providing direction for future research. We also discuss the model’s capacity to inform whistleblowing policy and procedures