The influence of the home environment on adolescents’ emotional vulnerability, feelings of being wronged and willingness to forgive others
The goal of the study was to investigate the link between adolescents’ home environment and their sense of injustice, emotional vulnerability and willingness to forgive others. Participants of the study were junior high school students raised in functional and dysfunctional families as well as students brought up in children’s homes. All participants filled in a detailed personal inventory which measured the degree of their sense of injustice. In the second part of the study we asked participants to predict their reactions to hypothetical scenarios. Participants from dysfunctional families cited a greater variety of sources of their sense of injustice and reported experiencing a sense of injustice more often than their peers, whereas participants who lived in children’s homes more often than other participants felt that fate had dealt them short. Willingness to forgive others was greatest among participants brought up in children’s homes, the remaining two groups of participants did not differ from each other in this respect.
