Interpersonal forgiving in close relationships: II. Theoretical elaboration and measurement.

Abstract

Interpersonal forgiving was conceptualized in the context of a 2-factor motivational system that governs people's responses to interpersonal offenses. Four studies were conducted to examine the extent to which forgiving could be predicted with relationship-level variables such as satisfaction, commitment, and closeness; offense-level variables such as apology and impact of the offense; and social-cognitive variables such as offunder-focused empathy and rumination about the offense. Also described is the development of the transgression-related interpersonal motivations inventory-a self-report measure designed to assess the 2-component motivational system (Avoidance and Revenge) posited to underlie forgiving. The measure demonstrated a variety of desirable psychometric properties, commending its use for future research. As predicted, empathy, apology, rumination, and several indexes of relationship closeness were associated with self-reported forgiving. The concept of forgiving, although not a traditional focus of personality and social psychology, has been of passing theoretical and empirical interest to the discipline for 40 years. In a chapter on benefit and harm in The Psychology oflnterpersonal Relations, Heider (1958) outlined a variety of attributional principles that underlie the quest for revenge after one has incurred an interpersonal transgression. In this context, Heider described forgiving as the forgoing of vengeful behavior, which he posited to be an implicit expression of the victim's self-worth. However,

Exploring the dimensionality of the TRIM-18 in the Spanish context

“…Also, meaningful associations were found between the TRIM-18-S scores and closeness of actual relationship. The more positive and close the relationship was, the more one forgives (McCullough et al, 1998). Significant correlations were found between empathy and TRIM-18-S (McCullough et al, 1997) even though they were lower than expected.…”

“…Single item of forgiveness: Participants answered a single-item measure (used by McCullough et al, 1998) to indicate the extent to which they had forgiven their offender. The 6-point response option ranged from 0 = none to 5 = completely.…”

“…The Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory (TRIM) is the most used instrument . The first version (TRIM-12) was developed by McCullough et al (1998). It assesses revenge (5 items) and avoidance (7 items) motivations following a perceived interpersonal offense by a particular person.…”

Rumination, emotion, and forgiveness: Three longitudinal studies.

“…In previous work, we assumed that a vengeful stance is associated with an angry, approach-related desire to harm one's transgressor in kind, whereas an avoidant stance is associated with a fearful desire to maintain a safe distance from the transgressor (McCullough et al, 1998(McCullough et al, , 1997. This latter motivation would seem less strongly linked to anger toward a transgressor and more strongly linked to fear of the transgressor.…”

“…Yet a third possibility is that the emotions that elicit avoidance motivation and revenge motivation are in fact more similar than different (cf. McCullough et al, 2003;McCullough & Hoyt, 2002;McCullough et al, 1998McCullough et al, , 1997.…”