Interest in forgiveness has explored in recent
years as researchers and clinicians began to recognize its value for
maintaining emotional well-being, physical health, and healthy intimate
relationships. Individuals who tend to adopt forgiving rather than revengeful
strategies generally have less aggressive behaviours and better interpersonal
relationships with others. We hypothesized that an individual’s interpersonal
relationship could be predicted by his/her trait forgiveness and aggressive
behaviour. We tested this hypothesis using a survey, in which five hundred and
thirty-eight college students (195 males and 343 females) from five
universities in China were investigated with Trait Forgiveness Scale (TFS),
Interpersonal Disturbance Scale (IDS), Social-support Scale (SS) and Aggression
Questionnaire (AQ). Descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were adopted
to analyse the data of survey in SPSS 21. Results indicated that (a)
significant gender differences existed in trait forgiveness, that is, trait
forgiveness of female students was significantly higher than that of male
students (t = -2.252, p< 0.05); (b) trait forgiveness
positively correlated with social support (r = 0.27,p< 0.001), and negatively correlated with interpersonal disturbance (r = -0.35,p< 0.001) and aggressive behaviours (r = -0.40,p< 0.001); (c) trait forgiveness was the best
predictor of interpersonal relationship; (d) aggressive behaviour served as a
partial mediator variable between trait forgiveness and interpersonal relationship.
These results imply that although trait forgiveness and aggressive behaviour
both affect an individual’s interpersonal relationship, the affecting paths
were different. Trait forgiveness may directly affect interpersonal
relationship, or indirectly through aggressive behaviour.
Primary Language | English |
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Journal Section | Articles |
Authors | |
Publication Date | September 15, 2019 |
Submission Date | July 13, 2019 |
Published in Issue | Year 2019Volume: 5 Issue: 14 |
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