Forgiveness

Abstract

Forgiveness, which MeSH classifies under emotions and under interpersonal relations, is a change in motivation toward someone who has caused harm: the urges to avoid and to retaliate subside and goodwill toward the offender grows. Psychology studies forgiveness as a response to interpersonal transgression, asking what it is, what predicts it, what it does to the body and to health, and how it can be promoted. Two accounts organise the field: a motivational account in which forgiveness is the decline of avoidance and revenge, and a coping account in which unforgiveness is a stress reaction that forgiveness replaces with positive emotion. This article defines forgiveness against reconciliation and pardon, surveys its correlates and its health evidence, reports the conditions under which forgiving can harm the forgiver, and reviews the therapies that promote it.

Keywords: forgiveness, unforgiveness, revenge motivation, empathy, emotion-focused coping

Forgiveness is what happens to a victim's motives when a wrong is not avenged and not nursed. An influential definition in the modern literature treats forgiving as a motivational transformation that inclines a person to inhibit relationship-destructive responses and to behave constructively toward someone who has behaved destructively toward them (McCullough et al., 1997). The construct matters to cognitive psychology for three reasons. It is a clear case of an emotion being regulated in the service of a relationship, so it sits at the junction of emotional regulation, social cognition and decision making. It has a measurable physiology: unforgiving and forgiving thoughts produce different cardiovascular and electromyographic responses (Witvliet et al., 2001). And it has a mature intervention literature, so claims about what forgiveness does can be tested against treatment trials rather than correlations alone (Wade et al., 2014).

What Forgiveness Is

Forgiveness is defined by what changes in the forgiver. A recent synthesis describes it as a shift in motivation away from retaliation and avoidance towards increased goodwill for the perceived wrongdoer, and credits it with a vital role in restoring social relationships and in personal wellbeing (Fourie et al., 2020). The motivational framing was deliberate. It locates forgiveness inside the victim, as a state of the victim's own motives, and so separates it from the interpersonal acts that often accompany it. Reconciliation, repentance and mercy are treated in the literature as related constructs (Exline et al., 2003). A person can forgive without reconciling, when the relationship is not safe to resume, and can reconcile without forgiving, for practical reasons.

The MeSH thesaurus, which indexes the medical literature, defines forgiveness more broadly as excusing or pardoning for an offense or release of anger or resentment, and files the descriptor both under emotions and under interpersonal relations. The double placement is informative. Forgiveness has the time course and the physiology of an emotional episode, but its object is always another person's conduct, so it is also a social process. The research definition narrows the thesaurus definition in one important way: excusing an offence, which denies that it was wrong, is not what the motivational definition describes. The instruments described below ask about the victim's motives toward the offender, not about the status of the act.

Forgiveness also comes in several grains. Researchers distinguish forgiving a particular offence, a state, from a disposition to forgive across offences and offenders, a trait, and both have been measured in the health literature (Lee & Enright, 2019). The Heartland Forgiveness Scale, a self-report measure of dispositional forgiveness, further separates forgiveness of self, forgiveness of others, and forgiveness of situations (Thompson et al., 2005). Self-forgiveness has had far less attention than forgiveness of others. A conceptual analysis observed that there was little conceptual or empirical scholarship on self-forgiveness, defined it, and distinguished it from interpersonal forgiveness and from pseudo self-forgiveness (Hall & Fincham, 2005). It has since acquired a health literature of its own: across 18 samples and 5,653 participants the correlation of self-forgiveness with physical health was .32, and across 65 samples and 17,939 participants its correlation with psychological well-being was .45 (Davis et al., 2015). A further distinction, between decisional and emotional forgiveness, is taken up below because it bears directly on health.

Forgiveness as Motivational Change

The dominant model treats forgiving as change within a two-factor motivational system that governs people's responses to interpersonal offenses (McCullough et al., 1998). After a transgression two motives rise: a motive to avoid the offender and a motive to seek revenge. Forgiving is the decline of both. The Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations inventory, usually called the TRIM, was built to measure exactly these two components, avoidance and revenge, as the system posited to underlie forgiving (McCullough et al., 1998). Later formulations add benevolence, so that forgiveness is tracked as increased goodwill for the perceived wrongdoer as well as the subsidence of ill will (Fourie et al., 2020).

Why do the motives decline? The empathy model answers that people forgive others to the extent that they experience empathy for them (McCullough et al., 1997). In the first test of the model, the relationship between receiving an apology and forgiving the offender was a function of increased empathy for the offender, and forgiving was uniquely related to conciliatory behavior and avoidance behavior toward the offending partner (McCullough et al., 1997). The same programme then manipulated empathy experimentally to examine the empathy-forgiving relationship more closely, and the results generally supported the link (McCullough et al., 1997). Empathy, on this account, is the route by which an apology does its work.

An evolutionary account asks what such a system is for. On this view humans possess an evolved cognitive system that implements deterrence, conceptualized as a revenge system, which imposes costs on an aggressor so that the aggressor and onlookers lower their estimate of the benefits of exploiting the retaliator again (McCullough et al., 2013). Revenge creates a second problem, the loss of downstream gains from the person punished, and so a subsidiary system is posited that restores particular relationships by inhibiting revenge and motivating behaviors that signal benevolence for the harmdoer (McCullough et al., 2013). Both systems are held to run on two estimates: the risk of future exploitation by the harmdoer and the expected future value of the relationship (McCullough et al., 2013). An apology, on this reading, matters because it lowers the first estimate and raises the second.

Figure 1

Two Motivational Systems Acting on a Transgression

The neuroscience is beginning to map these components. A review of the imaging literature against the evolutionary model emphasizes work that links the desire for vengeance to reward-based areas of the brain, singles out prefrontal areas likely associated with inhibition of vengeful feelings, and correlates the activity of a theory-of-mind network with assessments of the intentions and blameworthiness of those who commit harm (Billingsley & Losin, 2017). A second synthesis proposes that forgiveness relies on three distinct and interacting psychological macro-components, cognitive control, perspective taking, and social valuation, implicating the lateral prefrontal cortex, the temporoparietal junction, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex respectively (Fourie et al., 2020). The two syntheses converge on a picture in which forgiving is effortful: a vengeful impulse must be inhibited, the offender's mind must be modelled, and the relationship must be revalued.

What Predicts Forgiveness

The predictors of forgiving have been catalogued across hundreds of studies. The McCullough programme sorted them into 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 offender-focused empathy and rumination about the offense, and found that empathy, apology, rumination, and several indexes of relationship closeness were associated with self-reported forgiving (McCullough et al., 1998). A later review ordered the same antecedents from most distal to most proximal as personality, relationship factors, offense-specific factors, and social-cognitive factors including empathy, and found that empathy was a stronger correlate of forgiveness than any other non-social-cognitive antecedent except for trait agreeableness (Riek & Mania, 2012).

The largest synthesis meta-analyzed 175 studies and 26,006 participants on interpersonal forgiveness, defined as forgiveness of a single offender by a single victim, and proposed a tripartite typology of the victim's cognitions, affect, and constraints following the offense (Fehr et al., 2010). Its headline correlates are shown in Table 1. The variables with particularly notable effects were the offender's intent (r = -.49), state empathy (r = .51), apology (r = .42), and state anger (r = -.41), and situational constructs accounted for greater variance in forgiveness than victim dispositions (Fehr et al., 2010). Two widely assumed moderators turned out to be negligible: the effect of gender was nonsignificant (r = .01), and the effect of age was negligible (r = .06) (Fehr et al., 2010). Method mattered more than demography. Scenario methodologies led to enhanced effects for cognitions, while recall methodologies led to enhanced effects for affect (Fehr et al., 2010).

Table 1. Correlates of interpersonal forgiveness with notable effects in the Fehr et al. (2010) meta-analysis of 175 studies.

Note. Values are the meta-analytic correlations reported in the abstract of Fehr et al. (2010); the situational versus dispositional contrast is that paper's, in which situational constructs accounted for greater variance in forgiveness than victim dispositions.

The trait side has its own correlates. Dispositional forgiveness correlated positively with cognitive flexibility, positive affect, and distraction, and negatively with rumination, vengeance, and hostility (Thompson et al., 2005). The rumination finding recurs across the literature and is the cognitive counterpart of the grudge: an offence that is replayed is an offence that is kept alive, and forgiving requires the replaying to stop.

Forgiveness and Health

The second major account of forgiveness is a coping account. Unforgiveness is conceptualized as a stress reaction, and forgiveness is one of many ways people reduce it, by juxtaposing positive emotions such as empathy, sympathy, compassion, or love against the negative emotions of unforgiveness, so that it can be used as an emotion-focused coping strategy to reduce a stressful reaction to a transgression (Worthington & Scherer, 2004). This account connects forgiveness to the wider literature on psychological stress and coping skills, and it generates a prediction: if unforgiveness is a stress state, then holding a grudge should look like stress in the body.

It does. In an early psychophysiological study of forgiveness, 71 participants rehearsed hurtful memories and nursed grudges toward real-life offenders and, in other trials, cultivated empathic perspective taking and imagined granting forgiveness (Witvliet et al., 2001). Unforgiving thoughts prompted more aversive emotion and significantly higher corrugator (brow) electromyogram, skin conductance, heart rate, and blood pressure changes from baseline, and the EMG, skin conductance, and heart rate effects persisted after imagery into the recovery periods (Witvliet et al., 2001). Forgiving thoughts prompted greater perceived control and comparatively lower physiological stress responses (Witvliet et al., 2001). The persistence into recovery is the important detail: a grudge is not only aversive while it is being entertained, it leaves the body aroused after the thought has passed.

Not every kind of forgiveness should carry these effects. A review of the health literature distinguishes decisional forgiveness, a behavioral intention to resist an unforgiving stance and to respond differently toward a transgressor, from emotional forgiveness, the replacement of negative unforgiving emotions with positive other-oriented emotions, and argues that emotional forgiveness involves psychophysiological changes and has more direct health and well-being consequences (Worthington et al., 2007). The data linking forgiveness to health point to the role of emotional forgiveness, particularly when it becomes a pattern in dispositional forgivingness (Worthington et al., 2007). One can decide to forgive and still carry the grudge in the body; it is the emotional replacement that the health evidence tracks.

How large is the association? A meta-analysis of 103 independent samples, 606 correlations and 26,043 participants found a reliable overall association between forgiveness and health outcomes, stronger for psychological health than for physical health, though associations with cardiovascular health indicators, heart rate and blood pressure, were robust (Rasmussen et al., 2019). For physical health specifically, a meta-analysis of 128 studies with 58,531 participants found a significant positive relationship between forgiveness of others and physical health of r = 0.14, unaffected by any tested moderator, and its authors cautioned that because the results are correlational, intervention studies are needed to examine the causal effect (Lee & Enright, 2019). The forgiveness-health link is real, modest, and clearest in the psychological and cardiovascular domains.

Forgiveness may also act as a buffer rather than only as a direct influence. In a study of 148 young adults, greater lifetime stress severity and lower levels of forgiveness each uniquely predicted worse mental and physical health, and a graded interaction showed that associations between stress and mental health were weaker for persons exhibiting more forgiveness (Toussaint et al., 2016). The authors suggested that developing a more forgiving coping style may help minimize stress-related disorders (Toussaint et al., 2016). The coping account also allows indirect routes: forgiveness might affect health by working through social support, relationship quality, and religion (Worthington & Scherer, 2004).

The Dark Side of Forgiveness

The health literature is overwhelmingly positive, and that is the gap a smaller literature set out to fill: despite a burgeoning literature documenting positive implications of forgiveness, scholars knew very little about its potential negative implications (McNulty, 2011). If forgiveness removes the consequences of an offence, it may also remove the deterrent. In a longitudinal study of newlywed couples, the tendency to express forgiveness was predicted to let offenders feel free to offend again by removing unwanted consequences for their behavior, such as anger, criticism, rejection, and loneliness, that would otherwise discourage reoffending (McNulty, 2011). The data bore this out: spouses who reported being relatively more forgiving experienced psychological and physical aggression that remained stable over the first 4 years of marriage, whereas spouses who reported being relatively less forgiving experienced declines in both forms of aggression over time (McNulty, 2011). The study's conclusion was that forgiveness is not a panacea (McNulty, 2011).

A companion programme asked what forgiving does to the forgiver's view of the self. Drawing on interdependence theory and evolutionary psychology, it proposed that forgiving bolsters self-respect and self-concept clarity if the perpetrator has acted in a manner that signals that the victim will be safe and valued in a continued relationship, but diminishes them if the perpetrator has not (Luchies et al., 2010). Over the first 5 years of marriage, the association of forgiveness with trajectories of self-respect depended on the spouse's dispositional tendency to indicate that the partner will be safe and valued, that is, on agreeableness, and in experiments the effects of forgiveness on self-respect and self-concept clarity depended on the perpetrator's event-specific indication that the victim will be safe and valued, that is, on amends (Luchies et al., 2010). The authors named this the doormat effect: under some circumstances, forgiveness negatively impacts the self (Luchies et al., 2010).

These findings do not overturn the health evidence; they condition it. The evolutionary account fits this pattern, since the forgiveness system it posits operates by estimating the risk of future exploitation by the harmdoer (McCullough et al., 2013). Forgiveness helps when the offender has signalled, by apology or amends or a reliably agreeable character, that the relationship is safe to continue. When that signal is absent, forgiving is a cost to the forgiver, and the clinical literature's enthusiasm for forgiveness as a goal has to be read against it.

Promoting Forgiveness

Forgiveness can be taught, and the evidence comes from trials. An early controlled forgiveness intervention worked with 12 female incest survivors using a yoked, randomized experimental and waiting-list design, in which each participant met the intervener individually once a week for an average of 14.3 months, with a process model of forgiveness as the focus (Freedman & Enright, 1996). After the intervention, the experimental group gained more than the control group in forgiveness and hope and decreased significantly more than the control group in anxiety and depression, and the control group showed similar change patterns once it began the programme (Freedman & Enright, 1996). The duration is notable: forgiveness was pursued here as an explicit goal over more than a year, not as a single decision.

The intervention literature has since been pooled. A meta-analysis of 53 posttreatment effect sizes from 2,323 participants found that people receiving explicit forgiveness treatments reported significantly greater forgiveness than untreated participants, with a standardized difference of 0.56, and than participants receiving alternative treatments, 0.45, and that forgiveness treatments produced greater changes in depression, anxiety, and hope than no-treatment conditions (Wade et al., 2014). Treatment dosage, that is longer interventions, and individual rather than group modality uniquely predicted change in forgiveness against no-treatment controls, and differences between treatment approaches disappeared when controlling for other significant moderators (Wade et al., 2014). Two treatment models were compared in this meta-analysis, the Enright process model and the Worthington model, and the advantage for individual interventions was most clearly demonstrated for Enright-model interventions, as there had been no studies of individual interventions using the Worthington model (Wade et al., 2014). A second meta-analysis, restricted to randomized trials of process-based forgiveness interventions among people who had experienced hurt or violence, found reductions in depression (SMD = -0.37), anger and hostility (SMD = -0.49), and stress and distress (SMD = -0.66), and judged the evidence moderately strong (Akhtar & Barlow, 2018).

Two results in this literature deserve emphasis. The forgiveness-specific effect is not the whole effect: in the first meta-analysis, forgiveness treatments outperformed alternative treatments by less than they outperformed no treatment, which suggests that part of what a forgiveness intervention does is what any credible intervention does (Wade et al., 2014). And dose matters: longer interventions produce more forgiveness, which fits the picture of forgiveness as effortful motivational change rather than a decision that can be made once (Wade et al., 2014).

Worked Example

The meta-analytic numbers above are reported in two currencies, standardized mean differences for treatment effects and correlations for associations, and reading them requires converting each into something interpretable. Consider the standardized difference of 0.56 between people receiving a forgiveness intervention and untreated controls (Wade et al., 2014). Under a normal model, a difference of d standard deviations means that the average treated person scores at the Φ(d) quantile of the untreated distribution, where Φ is the standard normal cumulative distribution function. Φ(0.56) = 0.712, so the average treated participant reported more forgiveness than about 71% of untreated participants. For the comparison with alternative treatments, d = 0.45 and Φ(0.45) = 0.674, so the average forgiveness-treatment participant exceeded about 67% of those given another treatment.

A second conversion gives the probability that a randomly chosen treated person is more forgiving than a randomly chosen control, which is Φ(d/√2). For d = 0.56 this is Φ(0.396) = 0.654; for d = 0.45 it is Φ(0.318) = 0.625. The treated person wins the comparison roughly two times in three, which is a real but far from deterministic effect.

The health association is reported as a correlation. The meta-analytic correlation between forgiveness of others and physical health was r = 0.14 (Lee & Enright, 2019). Squaring it gives r² = 0.0196, so forgiveness shares about 2% of its variance with physical health. Converting to the same currency as the treatment effects, d = 2r/√(1 − r²) = 0.28/0.990 = 0.283, about half the size of the treatment effect on forgiveness itself. By comparison, the correlation of state empathy with forgiveness, r = .51 (Fehr et al., 2010), squares to 0.26, so empathy shares about 26% of its variance with forgiving. The arithmetic makes the shape of the field visible: forgiveness is strongly tied to empathy, moderately moved by treatment, and only weakly tied to physical health.

Discussion

Three lessons follow for cognitive psychology. First, forgiveness shows that an emotional response to harm is not a single quantity but a configuration of motives, and that the configuration can be measured. The two-factor motivational instrument (McCullough et al., 1998) made it possible to ask what moves avoidance and revenge separately, and the answer, empathy for the offender (McCullough et al., 1997), ties forgiveness to the perspective-taking machinery studied elsewhere under theory of mind and social cognition.

Second, the coping account and the psychophysiology together explain why a social process has health consequences. If unforgiveness is a stress reaction (Worthington & Scherer, 2004) and grudge rehearsal leaves cardiovascular arousal that outlasts the thought (Witvliet et al., 2001), then the modest but reliable health association (Rasmussen et al., 2019) has a mechanism, and the distinction between deciding to forgive and feeling forgiveness (Worthington et al., 2007) tells the clinician which kind to aim at.

Third, the field has had to learn that a prosocial motive can be exploited. The dark-side findings (McNulty, 2011; Luchies et al., 2010) are not an embarrassment to the theory; the evolutionary model holds that the forgiveness system operates by estimating the risk of future exploitation by the harmdoer and the expected future value of the relationship (McCullough et al., 2013). The practical lesson is that forgiveness is a response to be calibrated to the offender, not a virtue to be maximized.

Current Directions

Recent work is pulling forgiveness apart into its component processes and locating them in the brain. One synthesis proposes that forgiveness relies on three interacting macro-components, cognitive control, perspective taking, and social valuation, each with its own cortical network, while outlining caveats that limit the translational value of existing social neuroscience research (Fourie et al., 2020). A parallel review uses evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience to interrogate one another, identifies gaps in the existing neuroscientific literature, and proposes directions to address them (Billingsley & Losin, 2017). The shared ambition is to replace a single construct with a set of measurable processes whose failure points can be studied separately.

The health literature is consolidating. Two meta-analyses published in the same year reached compatible conclusions, one that the forgiveness-health association is stronger for psychological than for physical health with robust cardiovascular associations (Rasmussen et al., 2019), the other that the association with physical health alone is small, r = 0.14, and unmoderated, so that intervention studies rather than further correlations are what the causal question now requires (Lee & Enright, 2019). The intervention literature is moving to meet that demand, and the restriction of recent syntheses to randomized trials among people who have experienced hurt or violence marks a shift toward populations where the stakes are highest (Akhtar & Barlow, 2018). Whether forgiveness buffers the effects of cumulative stress on mental health, as the graded interaction in young adults suggests (Toussaint et al., 2016), is a question these trials are positioned to answer.

Common Misconceptions

“To forgive is to reconcile.”

The research definition places forgiveness in the victim's motives, as a shift away from retaliation and avoidance toward goodwill, while reconciliation, repentance and mercy are listed among the related constructs; a person can forgive an offender without resuming the relationship (Fourie et al., 2020; Exline et al., 2003).

“Forgiveness is always beneficial to the forgiver.”

In newlywed couples, spouses who were more forgiving experienced partner aggression that stayed stable over four years while less forgiving spouses saw it decline, and forgiving a partner who has not made amends erodes self-respect and self-concept clarity (McNulty, 2011; Luchies et al., 2010).

“Deciding to forgive is forgiving.”

Decisional forgiveness is a behavioural intention to respond differently toward the transgressor; emotional forgiveness is the replacement of unforgiving emotions with positive ones, and it is emotional forgiveness that involves psychophysiological change and carries the more direct health consequences (Worthington et al., 2007).

“Women forgive more than men, and people forgive more as they age.”

Across 175 studies the effect of gender on forgiveness was nonsignificant (r = .01) and the effect of age negligible (r = .06); the situation, especially the offender's intent and apology, mattered more than who the victim was (Fehr et al., 2010).

Glossary

Apology.

An offender's acknowledgement of wrongdoing; one of the strongest situational correlates of forgiveness, held in the empathy model to work by increasing empathy for the offender.

Avoidance motivation.

The post-transgression urge to withdraw from and keep distance from the offender; one of the two TRIM components whose decline constitutes forgiving.

Benevolence motivation.

Goodwill toward the offender; the positive motive whose growth, alongside falling avoidance and revenge, marks forgiveness in later motivational accounts.

Decisional forgiveness.

A behavioural intention to resist an unforgiving stance and to respond differently toward a transgressor, which may occur without any change in felt emotion.

Dispositional forgiveness.

A trait-like tendency to forgive across offences, offenders and time, also called forgivingness; measured by instruments such as the Heartland Forgiveness Scale.

Doormat effect.

The erosion of self-respect and self-concept clarity that follows forgiving a perpetrator who has not signalled that the victim will be safe and valued.

Emotion-focused coping.

Coping that regulates the emotional response to a stressor rather than the stressor itself; the category to which the coping account assigns forgiveness.

Emotional forgiveness.

The replacement of negative unforgiving emotions with positive other-oriented emotions; the form of forgiveness that involves psychophysiological change.

Empathy.

Feeling with or for another person; in the forgiveness literature, offender-focused empathy is among the strongest proximal predictors of forgiving.

Heartland Forgiveness Scale.

A self-report measure of dispositional forgiveness with subscales for forgiveness of self, of others, and of situations.

Interpersonal forgiveness.

Forgiveness of a single offender by a single victim, the unit of analysis in most of the forgiveness literature.

Process model of forgiveness.

A therapeutic approach in which forgiveness toward the offender is the explicit goal of an extended intervention; the model used in an early controlled forgiveness trial.

Reconciliation.

The restoration of a relationship between victim and offender; a related construct that forgiveness research keeps distinct from forgiveness itself.

Revenge motivation.

The post-transgression urge to see the offender harmed; the second TRIM component, and the output of the proposed deterrence system in the evolutionary account.

Rumination.

Repetitive dwelling on an offence and its consequences; a consistent negative correlate of forgiveness and the cognitive form of the grudge.

Self-forgiveness.

Forgiveness directed at one's own wrongdoing; a separate target of forgiveness with its own subscale on the Heartland Forgiveness Scale.

State forgiveness.

Forgiveness of a specific offence or offender, as distinct from the trait disposition to forgive.

TRIM inventory.

The Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations inventory, a self-report measure of the avoidance and revenge motivations posited to underlie forgiving.

Unforgiveness.

The complex of negative emotions and motives that follows a transgression and is maintained by rumination; conceptualised in the coping account as a stress reaction.

Key Researchers

Robert D. Enright

. Aristotelian Professor in Forgiveness Science, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison; pioneered the scientific study of forgiveness and the process model of forgiveness therapy, conducted an early controlled forgiveness intervention with incest survivors, and co-authored a meta-analysis of forgiveness and physical health. Faculty Page

Julie J. Exline

. Bonner-Lowry Professor and Research Director, Division of Perceptual Studies, University of Virginia, formerly Professor of Psychological Sciences at Case Western Reserve University; set the research agenda linking forgiveness to justice motives and studies forgiveness alongside religious and spiritual struggle. Faculty Page

Michael E. McCullough

. Professor of Psychology at the University of California San Diego, formerly University of Miami; defined forgiveness as a prosocial change in motivation toward an offender, developed the Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations inventory, and proposed an evolutionary account of the cognitive systems for revenge and forgiveness. ORCID - Wikipedia - Faculty Page

James K. McNulty

. Professor of Psychology at Florida State University; documented the dark side of forgiveness in longitudinal studies of newlywed couples, showing that a tendency to forgive can predict continued partner aggression, and co-authored the doormat-effect studies on self-respect. Faculty Page

Loren L. Toussaint

. Professor of Psychology at Luther College, where he directs the Laboratory for the Investigation of Mind, Body, and Spirit; studies the forgiveness-health connection, including evidence that forgiveness buffers the effect of lifetime stress on mental health. ORCID - Google Scholar - Faculty Page

Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet

. Senior Scholar at the Belmont Formation Collaborative, Belmont University, and Professor of Psychology at Hope College from 1997 to 2025; conducted the first psychophysiological studies of forgiveness, showing that rehearsing grudges raises cardiovascular and sympathetic arousal while forgiving imagery produces comparatively lower responses, and co-authored the review distinguishing emotional from decisional forgiveness. ORCID - Faculty Page

Everett L. Worthington

. Commonwealth Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University; framed forgiveness as an emotion-focused coping response and distinguished decisional from emotional forgiveness, co-developed the TRIM inventory, and co-authored the meta-analysis of forgiveness interventions. Wikipedia - Faculty Page

Frequently Asked Questions

What is forgiveness in psychology?

Forgiveness is a motivational transformation in the victim of a wrong: the inclination to inhibit relationship-destructive responses and to behave constructively toward someone who has behaved destructively toward them (McCullough et al., 1997).

Is forgiving the same as reconciling?

No. Forgiveness is a shift in the victim's own motives away from retaliation and avoidance toward goodwill, while reconciliation, repentance and mercy are treated as related constructs (Fourie et al., 2020; Exline et al., 2003).

What makes people more likely to forgive?

Empathy for the offender is among the strongest predictors, together with low perceived intent to harm and an apology; across 175 studies, situational factors explained more variance in forgiveness than the victim's personality, and gender and age had negligible effects (Fehr et al., 2010).

Does holding a grudge affect the body?

Yes. Rehearsing hurtful memories and nursing grudges raised brow muscle tension, skin conductance, heart rate and blood pressure above baseline, and several of these effects persisted into the recovery period after the imagery ended, whereas forgiving imagery produced lower physiological stress responses (Witvliet et al., 2001).

Is forgiveness good for health?

The association is reliable but modest. A meta-analysis of 103 samples found forgiveness related to health outcomes, more strongly for psychological than physical health, and a meta-analysis of 128 studies found a correlation of 0.14 between forgiveness of others and physical health (Rasmussen et al., 2019; Lee & Enright, 2019).

Can forgiveness be harmful?

It can. Among newlyweds, spouses who were more forgiving experienced partner aggression that stayed stable over four years while less forgiving spouses saw it decline, and forgiving a partner who has not made amends lowers self-respect and self-concept clarity (McNulty, 2011; Luchies et al., 2010).

What is the difference between decisional and emotional forgiveness?

Decisional forgiveness is a behavioural intention to resist an unforgiving stance and respond differently toward the transgressor; emotional forgiveness replaces negative unforgiving emotions with positive other-oriented ones, involves psychophysiological change, and has the more direct health consequences (Worthington et al., 2007).

Do forgiveness therapies work?

Yes. Across 53 effect sizes, people who received explicit forgiveness treatments reported more forgiveness than untreated participants, with a standardized difference of 0.56, and showed greater change in depression, anxiety and hope; longer and individual interventions produced larger gains (Wade et al., 2014).

References