Abstract
M.A.
Interpersonal forgiveness has been a topic of philosophical and theological inquiry for millennia (Enright, Gassin & Wu, 1992; McCullough, Sandage & Worthington, 1997). Despite the centrality of interpersonal forgiveness to the theology and piety of the great Western monotheistic traditions, it has failed to attract the attention of scientific inquiry within the field of psychology. The study of constructs associated with morality or concepts associated with deep religious roots like forgiveness, was not a domain considered significant by neutrally oriented modernistic researchers.
It was not until the last decade that psychologists began to give serious conceptual and empirical attention to the concept of forgiving and seeking forgiveness (Enright & Coyle, 1997; Sandage & Worthington, 1997). Psychological scholarship on interpersonal forgiveness has increased during the last ten years and it is beginning to be recognized as a social psychological phenomenon (McCullough & Worthington, 1999).
Psychological well-being is another concept that has recently started to flourish because pathogenesis rather than salutogenesis has been the main focus of many modernist practitioners. Unlike forgiveness, psychological well-being was introduced by modernist practitioners in the clinical literature. While many practices within modernistic psychology focused on pathology, proponents of humanistic psychology such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers have encouraged and supported a paradigm shift from pathology to well-being and healthy functioning.
Recent literature has linked the two dimensions of interpersonal forgiveness, namely expressing forgiveness and seeking forgiveness, with enhanced psychological well-being. Some of the studies investigated have associated willingness to forgive with a reduction in anxiety, depression, anger, bitterness and resentment as well as enhanced self-esteem and optimism for the future. Some scholars have (Worthington Jr, Kurusu, Collins, Jack, Ripley, & Baler. 2000; Freeedman & Enright, 1996) demonstrated a positive correlation between willingness to forgive and enhanced psychological well-being. Some studies (Kaminer, Stein, Mbanga & Zungu-Dirwayi, 2001; Maltby, Macaskill & Day, 2001; Mauger, Perry, Freeman, Grove, McBride & McKinney, 1992) have shown that failure to forgive others shared significant positive relationships with increased depression, post traumatic stress disorder, psychotic symptoms and social Imagining oneself seeking forgiveness also carries a range of positive emotional benefits.
Although interpersonal forgiveness literature has gained momentum overseas, very little empirical attention has been given to this concept in South Africa. The aim of this exploratory study is to examine the existing literature in order to investigate how past scholars established the positive relationship between the two dimensions of interpersonal forgiveness and improvement in psychological well-being. It is hoped that this type of exploration, i.e. the literature review search, would also generate hypotheses that could direct future research in South Africa.
Some of the findings of this literature review study are:
• Scholars who established the relationship between forgiving and improved psychological well-being and those who showed the link between seeking forgiveness and enhanced psychological well-being used different approaches to arrive at their findings.
• Quantitative methodologies were employed by researchers who established the link between forgiving and psychological well-being and seeking forgiveness and psychological well-being.
• Psychometric tests (forgiveness scales and other scales used to measure psychological well-being) were the main instruments used for purposes of collecting data by researchers who established the link between forgiving and psychological well-being and seeking forgiveness and psychological well-being.
• Although all the studies articulated the link between interpersonal forgiveness and psychological well-being, none of them defined psychological well-being. Psychometric instruments used to measure psychological well-being were different to psychological well-being instruments used by the fourth psychology (Positive Psychology) researchers. In the studies gathered for analysis by this literature review study, symptomatology scales were used to assess the level of psychological well-being.
This exploratory literature review study concluded that interpersonal forgiveness is a relevant and worthwhile research area for pursuit in South Africa.