Tagged: “forgiveness therapy”

2020: A Record-Setting Year for Dr. Robert Enright and the International Forgiveness Institute

January 13, 2021 No comments

While “perseverance” and “grit” may  be apt descriptors for what turned out to be perhaps the most peculiar year in modern history, forgiveness researcher Dr. Robert Enright, founder of the International Forgiveness Institute, has a different take on 2020: “Without question, it turned out to be our most productive year since I began studying forgiveness three decades ago.”

 

Scientific Research Studies:

To illustrate his point, the man Time magazine called “the forgiveness trailblazer,” rattled off the 11 scientifically-based manuscripts he and various team members completed and had published or accepted for publication during the year. Covering a wide range of cultural diversity, and encompassing studies in seven countries with both adult and child participants, those studies included (click title to read more):

Forgiveness Presentations:

In addition to his first love (scientific research on forgiveness, as evidenced by the list above), Dr. Enright developed and delivered targeted forgiveness presentations in the U.S. and around the world during 2020. His more noteworthy audiences included:

  • Staff and imprisoned people at Her Majesty’s Prison – Edinburgh, Scotland.
  • Doctors and medical specialists attending an online conference on polyclonal immunoglobulins in patients with multiple myeloma – Bratislava, Slovakia. 
  • Pediatricians, oncologists, and cancer treatment specialists attending the Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Educational Conference – Madison, Wisconsin.
  • Faculty and research associates at the Pan-European University – Bratislava, Slovakia.
  • School administrators and teachers – Belfast, Northern Ireland.
  • Students and faculty of Liberty University – Lynchburg, Virginia.
  • Rotary Club members – Richmond, California.

Media Interviews, Podcasts, Video Productions:

As a highly-sought-after media personality, Dr. Enright’s 2020 media interviews included:

  • A 67-minute podcast hosted and broadcast by Dr. Alexandra Miller, a popular family relations psychologist, on Rehabilitating those who are ‘Forgotten’: People in Prison. The podcast was downloaded by individuals in 225 US cities and 22 foreign countries in just the first three weeks after it was recorded in July.
  • A multi-segment forgiveness video produced for Revolution Ventures, Bangalore, India.
  • A “therapeutic music-discussion video” with song-writer/performer Sam Ness that was produced for those struggling with anguish caused by COVID-19. The therapeutic video, called “How to Beat the Coronavirus Lockdown Blues,” was distributed worldwide through venues including YouTube.
  • A video interview at the International School of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel.
  • Interview for DER SPIEGEL/Spiegel online, a German weekly news magazine that has the largest circulation of any such publication in Europe.
  • Interview with author Aaron Hutchins for Maclean’s—a current affairs magazine with 2.4 million readers based in Toronto,  Canada.
  • Interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH, Germany’s largest daily newspaper.
  • Podcast interview with Dr. Peter Miller, Sport and the Growing Good: 8 Keys to Forgiveness.
  • Live interview, The Drew Mariani Show (national), Relevant Radio.
  • Interview with Dr. Max Bonilla, International Director, Expanded Reason webinar, Madrid, Spain.

BLOGS AND MORE:

The activity doesn’t stop there. During 2020, Dr. Enright:

  • Authored 12 new forgiveness-related blogs for Psychology Today and 12 more for “Our Forgiveness Blog” on the International Forgiveness Institute website.
  • Provided written responses on the IFI website for 208 “Ask Dr. Forgiveness” questions.
  • Together with Jacqueline Song, IFI researcher and creator of the IFI’s Driver Safety Campaign, distributed more than 5,000 “Drive for Others’ Lives” bumper stickers requested by website visitors and funded by a grant from the Green Bay Packers Foundation.

 

In reflecting lately on forgiveness, I am left with a certain hopelessness and powerlessness regarding society. I feel this way because, in thinking about it, I have come to the conclusion that those who have been brutalized by others, such as incest survivors, really have no other choice than to forgive if they are to save themselves from a life of deep resentment and all that negatively goes with that. What do you think about my thinking?

December 28, 2020 No comments

I agree that forgiveness can be a bold, courageous, and even controversial response to brutality.  Yet, for those who choose to forgive, they can become much more psychologically resilient and the science supports that conclusion.  I am wondering why this makes you hopeless.  You, yourself, see one solution to the anger and even hopelessness of the victims.  I agree that not all who are brutalized will forgive, but for those who do, they can reverse the psychological damage done even when it is impossible to reverse the offense itself.  This, to me, is a cause of hope, not hopelessness.

As a strict philosophical materialist, I am convinced that there are no such things as moral offenses caused by an offender. I say this because there is no free will and so we cannot pin blame on “offenders” for their behavior. They have not chosen to act this way.

December 27, 2020 No comments

Well, I have to disagree.  Social science researchers claiming that brain activity preceded an observed behavior by participants never——never——study this in the context of morals.  In every case, the researchers measure such activity as button-pushing: Does the brain activity occur before a person pushes a button or does the person first decide to push the button and then it is registered in the brain?  Button-pushing has nothing whatsoever to do with moral decisions.  Would you claim that the person who executed little girls in the Amish community of Pennsylvania in 2006 “just couldn’t help it”?  Could he not help it when he lined them up?  Did his brain make him pull the trigger and some cause outside of him lead to what the executioner’s weapon was to be?  Had he lived, would you advocate no court trial? 

When it comes to morals and the claim that people have no free will, you have to be careful that your view of humanity does not degenerate.  I say that because your view leads to the ultimate conclusion that no person who acts monstrously ever can be rehabilitated other than through some kind of yet undiscovered brain surgery.  Surely some who act monstrously might have a brain lesion, but that would be the rare case, what Aristotle would call an Accident.  Why do I say this?  It is because many times (far too many) a young and very physically-healthy person has committed acts of unspeakable brutality.  Thus, the Aristotelian Accidents do not account for the entire story explaining monstrous behavior.  Free will, then, leading to self-chosen acts, seems to fit better such moral examples as occurred in the Amish community.

A NEW STRATEGY FOR PEACE IN THE WORLD. . . THE ENRIGHT GROUP FORGIVENESS INVENTORY

December 10, 2020 No comments

A team of researchers led by Dr. Robert Enright has taken forgiveness from its traditional focus on individuals to a higher magnitude by concentrating on group forgiveness—an area of intervention that has dramatic implications for its ability to enhance peace efforts in the world.

Dr. Enright’s team, composed of 16 experienced researchers who collected data from 595 study participants in three different geographic and cultural settings of the world, developed and confirmed the veracity of a totally new measure of intergroup forgiveness—The Enright Group Forgiveness Inventory (EGFI). Additionally, the team created and piloted a unique group administration process that operationalized the EGFI in a structured way.

“Our concept of intergroup forgiveness for this study was rooted in what groups, as opposed to the individuals who compose them, have the capacity to do,” says Dr. Enright, a professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-founder of the International Forgiveness Institute. “The study supported the conclusion that this new measure had strong internal consistency, as well as convergent and discriminant validity.”

In other words, to paraphrase Dr. Enright’s synopsis of the EGFI, it works. That is the conclusion reached by Dr. Enright’s 16-member research team in their study report,  Measuring Intergroup Forgiveness: The Enright Group Forgiveness Inventory. The study was published earlier this year in Peace and Conflict Studies Journal (Vol. 27, No. 1), as the lead article for that issue of the journal.

To realistically test the measure, the team selected  groups of people within countries that have historical conflicts that remain salient today. One group of participants was recruited from Asia with subsamples from Mainland China and from Taiwan. Another group of participants was recruited from Slovenia that contained subsamples from two different political parties with a history of violence toward each other. A third group of participants was recruited from the United States with subsamples that included a group of White Caucasian participants and a group of African American participants.

The new Inventory has 56 items across seven subscales and each subscale has eight items. Those subscales measure a group’s motivation and values regarding forgiveness, peace, and friendliness toward the other group. Similar to the Enright Forgiveness Inventory (EFI)—developed in 1995 and now the worldwide measurement tool of choice for assessing one person’s forgiveness of another—the EGFI has five questions at the end of the scale that are intended to assess pseudo-group-forgiveness or false forgiveness.

For this study, the inventory was translated into Mandarin Chinese and Slovene by native speakers of each language. The Inventory was then administered and assessed with individual participants as well as with the designated groups of participants. That strategy allowed the project team to compare a group-based assessment of forgiveness with traditional self-report assessment of forgiveness.

That assessment was a crucial element of this latest study because the bulk of past research has simply extended measures of forgiveness between individuals to groups. In fact, Dr. Enright et al. produced a study in January 2015 (Journal of Peace Psychology) entitled “Examining Group Forgiveness: Conceptual and Empirical Issues” that  was one of the first to propose: 1) a benchmark definition of group forgiveness; and, 2) specific concepts for developing a group forgiveness measuring tool.

Incorporating that earlier work, the newly-developed EGFI scale of intergroup forgiveness is based on a definition of forgiveness between groups and is operationalized using group behaviors rather than individual cognition and emotion.

“Our findings suggest the EGFI is a reliable and valid measure of intergroup forgiveness,” the study group concludes in its final report. “This new measure can facilitate the work of peace advocates and researchers.” The study also indicates the Inventory could be used to:

  • Assess where and when to intervene with conflicting groups;
  • Evaluate the effectiveness of conflict resolution efforts;
  • Assess where groups have been unjust to one another and, therefore, where they could benefit from conflict reduction efforts;
  • Assess group forgiveness interventions;
  • Evaluate progress when groups go through interventions such as peace and reconciliation commissions;
  • Assess change in forgiveness from pre to post intervention; and,
  • Advance our understanding of effective interventions. 

Meet the Group Forgiveness Study Team:

  • Robert D. Enright, University of Wisconsin-Madison and International Forgiveness Institute
  • Julie Johnson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Matthew Hirshberg, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • John Klatt, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Benjamin Boateng, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Preston Boggs, University of Wisconsin-Madison 
  • Chelsea Olson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Peiying Wu, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Baoyu Zhang, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Fu Na, Beijing Normal University – Beijing, China
  • Mei Ling Shu, Beijing Normal University – Beijing China
  • Tomaz Erzar, University of Ljubljana – Ljubljana, Slovenia
  • Tina Huang, National Chung-Cheng University – Taiwan (officially the Republic of China)
  • Tung-En Hsiao, National Chung-Cheng University – Taiwan
  • Chansoon (Danielle) Lee, National Council of State Boards of Nursing – Chicago, IL
  • Jacqueline Song, International Forgiveness Institute, Madison, WI (native of the Philippines)

 

What are your latest forgiveness projects?

November 29, 2020 No comments

We have five projects right now at the International Forgiveness Institute:

1) We have a bumper sticker campaign entitled, “Drive for Others’ Lives.”  The point is that, when driving, people are encouraged to think about those in the other cars and to behave in such a way as to respect them for the purpose of keeping them safe.

2)  We are working on forgiveness interventions for people who are without homes, specifically those who: a) have unjust treatment from others in the past; b) are experiencing now excessive anger, anxiety, and depression in need of healing; and c) currently are not forgiving the people from the past for their injustices.  We expect that the forgiveness intervention toward those from the past will lessen the current psychological challenges and possibly aid them in securing more stable housing across time.

3) We are doing similar programs (as described in #2 above)  for people who are in prison.

4) Forgiveness education through our curriculum guides for educators of children (as young as age 4) through adolescence (up to age 18).

5) We are planning an international forgiveness conference in July, 2022 for educators, particularly educators who have been teaching forgiveness in Hong Kong, Northern Ireland, and Israel and the West Bank.