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

Abstract

In the year 2006, the American Psychological Association published a series of Research Briefs brochures to make availableto the public short outlines on contemporary psychological studies of themes relevant to the United Nations’ mission. Oneof the items that was listed and given a considerable attention within the psychological fi eld was ‘forgiveness’. Thatinitiative, despite the fact that forgiveness has been considered rather a theological issue, has generated a great interestamong psychologists, thus leading them to undertake some projects on forgiveness. In accordance with this concept offorgiveness, 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 researchwe used the following instruments: Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory (TRIM-12), The MaritalOffence-Specifi c Forgiveness Scale (MOFS) adapted to the adolescents’ sample, Trait Forgiveness Scale (TFS), andPortrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ). The results obtained in the study show that forgiveness is positively related to selftranscendentand conservation values, and negatively correlated with self-enhancement and openness to change values.