The Influence of Intentionality and Inhibitory Control on Forgiveness of Children with Disabilities

Although a unanimously accepted definition is not found in the literature, most researchers argue that forgiveness involves decreasing negative emotions towards the transgressor, i.e. the person who has broken a norm, decreasing the motivation to hurt them and increasing positive emotions towards them. Our research aimed to investigate the extent to which school children can distinguish between an intentional violation of a classroom norm and an unintentional violation generated by physiological limitations specific to a disability. According to our results, children in the preparatory class understand that certain undesirable behaviors are caused by a disability, in our case, hearing disability, while other behaviors are not. Furthermore, children's decision to play with a transgressor depends on the intentionality of the rule violation, but according to our data, the transgressor's intention to violate a rule did not influence the number of resources that participants provided. We explain these findings through the theoretical framework proposed by McCullough et al. (2013) on the adaptive role of forgiveness and revenge and we analyze the implications that the present research has for the inclusion process of children with special educational needs.