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Two studies were conducted considering the potential impact of making God's grace cognitively salient upon the willingness to forgive a transgressor. In the first study, participants were randomly assigned to a series of exercises designed to make God's grace cognitively salient or a control condition. The results revealed that making God's grace cognitively salient increased emotional forgiveness but not decisional forgiveness. The second study combined an experimental manipulation of grace salience with McCullough, Root, and Cohen's (2006) recalling benefits strategy for promoting forgiveness in a 2 x 2 factorial design. This study revealed a significant interaction for decisional forgiveness with the combination of both manipulations producing high levels of forgiveness. With emotional forgiveness, there was a significant main effect for grace salience (replicating the earlier finding) and a significant interaction indicating that the combination of grace salience and recalling benefits produced higher levels of emotional forgiveness. The overall findings were then explicated by considering the potential power of making God's grace cognitively salient to help frame the recall of past transgressions.
The meaning of grace can vary across time and culture. Within the Hebrew and Greek languages, grace is akin to "favour" (Vine, 1996). Within American culture, someone can be described as "graceful" or individuals may "grace" you with their presence. Emmons, Hill, Barrett and Kapic (2017) defined grace as "a gift given unconditionally and voluntarily to an undeserving person by an unobligated giver" (p. 276). The term can be used with or without invoking the Divine. Apart from the Divine, the concept of grace can be found in the psychological concept of unconditional positive regard (see Emmons et al.), which is often characterized as a voluntary gift from the therapist to a client. The warm acceptance of a client without conditions seems to capture key aspects of grace. Within religious cultures, grace typically evokes the Divine. For example, such a definition can be found in Bassett et al. (2017), "the unmerited favor of God, as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings in this world" (p. 3). However, within the context of grace, what drove this project was the social psychological finding that good outcomes produce good actions (e. g., see the literature on happy people helping; Isen, Clark,...