Tagged: “Forgiving”

ENRIGHT FORGIVENESS INVENTORY, A STANDARD MEASUREMENT TOOL USED AROUND THE WORLD, NOW AVAILABLE IN SHORTER VERSION

An eight-nation study designed to test the applicability and sensitivity of the new short form of the Enright Forgiveness Inventory, the EFI-30, has demonstrated that the new instrument is a reliable and valid research tool that can be used across widely diverse cultures.

The Enright Forgiveness Inventory-30 (EFI-30) is a shorter version of the Enright Forgiveness Inventory for Adults (EFI) that was the first forgiveness measurement tool developed by Dr. Robert Enright and his Human Development Study Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The EFI is an objective measure of the degree to which one person forgives another who has hurt him or her deeply and unfairly. 

After its development in 1995, the EFI quickly became a central component of forgiveness research both in the U.S. and internationally. It has been translated from English (original language) into Brazilian-Portuguese, Chinese, German, Hebrew, Korean, Dutch, and other languages. Its reliability and validity have been exhibited in Master’s theses, doctoral dissertations, and empirical articles published around the world.

The new study, Validating the Enright Forgiveness Inventory-30, was published this month in the European Journal of Psychological Assessment. It outlines the process and rationale used by the study’s authors to create a shorter version of the EFI (30 items instead of the original 60) that could convey the same meaningful information on the degree of interpersonal forgiveness across the domains of affect, behavior, and cognition. In other words, they developed a smaller, less time-consuming scale that is still accurate and reliable.

Data from the U.S. were used in the creation of the new measure and applied to seven other countries: Austria, Brazil, Israel, South Korea, Norway, Pakistan, and Taiwan. Results from the study provided the psychometric evidence for the reduced version of the EFI-30 across cultures.     (NOTE: psychometrics is the branch of psychology that deals with the design, administration, and interpretation of quantitative tests for the measurement of psychological variables such as intelligence, aptitude, and personality traits.)

“While the EFI is particularly relevant when it accurately assesses people with low degrees of forgiveness,” Dr. Enright said in comparing the two research tools, “the EFI-30 has still demonstrated its effectiveness to distinguish particular cultural social norms that apply to the behavioral expression of forgiveness.”

According to Dr. Enright, the new EFI-30 tool is suitable to verify affective, behavioral, and cognitive changes in people who choose forgiveness for improvement of their well-being. He adds that it is designed to assess six psychological stances of victims toward offenders: positive affect, negative affect, positive behavior, negative behavior, positive cognition, and negative cognition.

The EFI-30 and other highly-regarded forgiveness research tools developed by Dr. Enright, co-founder of the International Forgiveness Institute (IFI), are now available absolutely free to any forgiveness researcher who requests them. To learn more about the tools, see the IFI website article Coveted Forgiveness Research Tools Now Available at No Cost. To request Research Tools for your own use, see Dr. Enright’s Forgiveness Research Tools.

New Study Shows Forgiveness Intervention can Improve Mental Health of Grieving Parents

In the first ever true experimental study of its kind, researchers have demonstrated the effectiveness of an educational forgiveness intervention on improving the mental health of parents grieving the loss of a child. The research was conceptualized and done by Lucia Záhorcová, a psychologist at  Trnava University in Slovakia. The forgiveness intervention was developed by Dr. Robert Enright, co-founder of the International Forgiveness Institute, who also directed the study in the country that was once part of Czechoslovakia.

The pilot study results showed that participants in the experimental group (who received the forgiveness intervention), compared to those in the control group, achieved:

• Statistically greater improvement in forgiveness towards others and in self-forgiveness in both the post-test and the follow-up test conducted four months after the end of the intervention;
• A greater decrease in depression in both the post-test and follow-up test;
• A greater decrease in anxiety and anger in the post-test; and,
• Higher improvement in the post-traumatic growth in the follow-up test.

“The death of a child is a one of the most devastating and traumatic experiences a parent can endure,” according to Dr. Enright. “That’s why we wanted to determine if forgiveness could be a positive influence in reducing a parent’s depression, anxiety and anger just as it has been demonstrated in our studies with other clinical populations like incest survivors, emotionally-abused women, and post-abortion men.”

Dr. Enright said the study in Slovakia was the first ever forgiveness intervention with grieving parents in which a control group was used. It included 21 parents randomly assigned to the experimental group (in which the educational forgiveness intervention occurred) and 21 to the control group (in which a psycho-education grief intervention with a humanistic approach took place). All the parents were grieving the loss of a child older than three years of age.

“The study demonstrated that the forgiveness intervention definitely resulted in mental health improvements for parents grieving the loss of a child,” Dr. Enright stated. “The ability to forgive another person, perhaps even the murderer of their child, can positively influence the mental health of a bereaved parent.”

The Effectiveness of a Forgiveness Intervention on Mental Health in Bereaved Parents – a Pilot Study, was published on June 21, 2021, in OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying. In addition to Dr. Enright (Dept. of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison) the study researchers included Lucia Záhorcová and Peter Halama, both in the Dept. of Psychology at Trnava University in Trnava, Slovakia. The three also teamed up for a 2019 study of 84 grieving parents called Forgiveness as a Factor of Adjustment in Bereaved Parents.

What if I think that forgiveness is not the solution?  Then what?

Forgiveness is not necessarily a solution to injustice because to right that wrong you need the moral virtue of justice.  Forgiveness is a response to injustice in that you are now confronting the effects of the injustice (anger, possibly a strained relationship, disharmony in the family or organization) and so it is important to address those negative effects, if you choose to forgive.  So, if you are thinking about forgiveness as solving the problem of injustice, I think you are asking the wrong question about forgiveness. Instead of “How will forgiveness solve this problem?” I would urge you to ask a different question: “How can forgiveness help me (and us) overcome the negative effects of the injustice?”

Is it possible that for some people forgiveness does not “work” in that they find no relief?

When this happens, I recommend: 1) more time in forgiving this person and, if this still is not working, 2) try to see if this person reminds you of someone else in need of your forgiving.  For example, a person is having trouble forgiving his wife.  His wife has behavioral patterns similar to his mother, whom he has not forgiven.  I then recommend that he forgive his mother first.  When he then focuses on forgiving his wife, the anger toward his mother is not getting in the way of that forgiving.

You have said that once we forgive people, then we are ready for the next injustice and we might be able to go ahead a little better the second time. Isn’t that statement self-righteous? I say that because some people and some injustices are much harder to forgive than others. Why do you claim that we just get better and better in our forgiving?

Aristotle made the wise point that as we practice any of the moral virtues, this practice helps us get better in how we appropriate the virtues.  He never implied, nor do I, that the next incident will lead to quicker forgiveness than the first one and the person easier to forgive just because of the practice.  Instead, Aristotle implied this:  We will be more familiar with the process of practicing the virtue and so we may be more efficient and accurate in our next attempt.  Yes, you are correct, in that the next person who hurts us might do so in a very grave way, making it hard to forgive.  Yet, if we bring a lot of experience to this new person and situation, we may get through it more deeply and more quickly than otherwise might have been the case.

To get very concrete about this, suppose that to forgive Person A, you ideally needed two weeks.  To forgive Person B, without your having any prior practice in forgiving, you would need six months to forgive because the incident was so unjust.  Yet, if you have a lot of practice in forgiving, then your forgiving Person B now might take only three months rather than six.  Yes, this is still much longer than what was needed to forgive Person A, but the time needed for this with Person B is shortened precisely because the former practice is aiding your forgiving Person B now.