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

In the year 2006, the American Psychological Association published a series of Research Briefs brochures to make available to the public short outlines on contemporary psychological studies of themes relevant to the United Nations’ mission. One of the items that was listed and given a considerable attention within the psychological field was ‘forgiveness’. That initiative, despite the fact that forgiveness has been considered rather a theological issue, has generated a great interest among psychologists, thus leading them to undertake some projects on forgiveness. In accordance with this concept of forgiveness, 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 research we used the following instruments: Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory (TRIM-12), The Marital Offence-Specific Forgiveness Scale (MOFS) adapted to the adolescents’ sample, Trait Forgiveness Scale (TFS), and Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ). The results obtained in the study show that forgiveness is positively related to selftranscendent and conservation values, and negatively correlated with self-enhancement and openness to change values.