The foremost gift or the impossible ideal to reach? Valorial components of forgiveness among Italian adolescents

• Authors: Małgorzata Szcześniak , Martina Vitali , Gloria Rondón
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The foremost gift or the impossible ideal to reach? Valorial components of forgiveness among Italian adolescents In the year 2006, the American Psychological Association published a series of Research Briefs brochures to make available to the public short outlines on contemporary psychological studies of themes relevant to the United Nations’ mission. One of the items that was listed and given a considerable attention within the psychological fi eld was ‘forgiveness’. That initiative, despite the fact that forgiveness has been considered rather a theological issue, has generated a great interest among psychologists, thus leading them to undertake some projects on forgiveness. In accordance with this concept of forgiveness, we chose in this research to investigate an individual’s ability to forgive as related to a basic human value. The study involved 274 Italian adolescents between 14 and 19 years of age. To measure variables involved in the research we used the following instruments: Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory (TRIM-12), The Marital Offence-Specifi c Forgiveness Scale (MOFS) adapted to the adolescents’ sample, Trait Forgiveness Scale (TFS), and Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ). The results obtained in the study show that forgiveness is positively related to selftranscendent and conservation values, and negatively correlated with self-enhancement and openness to change values.

Keywords

EN

Forgiveness; Avoidance; Revenge; Basic Human Values

• Publisher: Committee for Psychological Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Polish Psychological Bulletin
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 43
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 199-209

Contributors

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Małgorzata Szcześniak

• Institute of Psychology, Department of General Psychology, University of Szczecin, Krakowska 69, 71-017 Szczecin, Poland

author

Martina Vitali

• Pontifi cal Faculty of Educational Sciences, Institute of Psychology, via Cremolino 141, Rome, Italy

author

Gloria Rondón

• Colegio Rudolf Steiner Medellín, Colombia