Gender Differences in Offense Specific and Dispositional Forgiveness among Indian Adolescents

Abstract

Almost everyone is unforgiving at times. Many people seek to deal with the revenge and avoidance of unforgiveness by forgiving. It is very much debatable that many problems in living, both clinically severe and normal ones, have their roots in or are exacerbated by interpersonal offenses. Cognitive therapy for example emphasizes that virtually all of human disturbance is the result of blaming others, society or the self for things that have happened, (Beck, 1995; Ellis & Dryden, 1997) but therapists have less to offer about enabling their clients to learn positive responses to such behavior. Acknowledging this hiatus, positive psychologists have only recently begun to study forgiveness despite its importance in human interactions. Therefore, within the past decade, social scientists and practitioners have become increasingly interested in this virtual concept and its potential for improving personal well being and improving interpersonal relationships. Western literature so far, tells us that foigiveness can be a helpful counseling tool with a wide range of populations including incest survivors, substance abusers and cancer patients (Enright & Fitzgibbons, 2000). Psychological definitions of foigiveness tends to focus on forgiveness as an action or an attitude on the part of the forgiver, benefits of forgiving and the role of foigiveness in psychotherapy. This overview of psychological understandings of forgiveness began with the work of Enright and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin in defining forgiveness from a cognitive developmental perspective (Park & Enright, 1997).According to Enright (Enright and Human Development Study group, 1991), forgiveness can be defined as overcoming negative thoughts, feelings and behaviors directed at an offender and developing positive thoughts feelings and behaviors visa vis the same.Working from the perspective of marital and family therapy, Hargrave and Sells (1997), defined forgiveness as (1) allowing one's victimizer to rebuild trust in the relationship through acting in a trustworthy fashion and (2) promoting an open discussion of the relational violation, so that the offended partner and the offender can agree to work toward an improved relationship.Forgiveness is essentially a gift from one person to another. This gift is offered in order to enhance attachment, harmony or love between people, and the feeling of community between people. Enright and Coyle (1998) describe forgiveness as voluntary and unconditional.Forgiveness can be measured in two ways, as either a general willingness to forgive, termed forgivingness, (McCullough et al., 2000a), which is an expressed attitude towards forgiveness or as a reported response to an actual situation where a transgression has occurred, termed situational forgiveness, (Subkoviak et al., 1995). McCullough et al. (2000b) make a further distinction with regard to situational forgiveness in terms of offence specific forgiveness which, as the name suggests, focuses on one situation where a transgression has occurred, and dyadic measures of forgiveness, that record the degree of foigiveness occurring after a series of transgressions within one relationship. This study focuses on offence specific and dispositional forgiveness.The need for forgiveness obviously arises from these processes of blame allocation. The target requiring forgiveness may be others or the self or it may be more nebulous such as God, fate, or the world in general (Forgiveness of situations) (Macaskill, 2003).Currently, ambiguity exists with respect to a myriad of issues related to forgiveness, the role of gender effect being one of them. Gender effect on forgiveness has been assessed in the western studies and the usual finding is that gender plays a very limited role (McCullough et al., 1998). The emeigent literature on forgiveness does not yet include a specific focus on exploring sex differences, although it is included as a variable in a few studies (Macaskill, 2003). …