Investigating the Affective Signature of Forgivingness across the Adult Years

Abstract

Though dispositional forgiveness has been associated with affective well-being, it remains unclear whether these associations are consistent throughout adulthood. The current study investigated whether forgivingness interacted with chronological age or future time perspective to predict affect at the trait and daily level. Participants (n = 332, mean age: 45.5 years) completed baseline measures of forgivingness, positive and negative affect, and future time perspective, along with daily assessments of positive and negative affect for up to ten days. Results suggest that the associations between forgivingness and affective well-being differ somewhat based on age and future time perspective, and level of analysis.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

During the work on his dissertation, Marko Katana was a predoctoral fellow of LIFE (International Max Planck Research School on the Life Course; participating institutions: MPI for Human Development, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, University of Zurich).

Notes

1. It is difficult to control for whether dyadic data dependency impacted the current findings, given the sampling approach combining romantic partners and friends, which in turn complicates the addition of a third dyadic-level to the model. Though we do not have a reason to believe the dyadic structure would impact the findings, we did rerun the models presented in Tables 2 and 3 with only one member of each dyad included. These models of course are relatively underpowered with only half the sample included. Even so, we did evidence the same interaction between forgivingness and future time perspective predicting trait negative affect (B = 0.062, p = 0.009) and the interaction with age predicting negative affect was marginally significant in the same direction as shown in Table 2 (B = −0.06, p = 0.068). Regarding Table 3, the age-by-forgivingness interaction found for daily negative affect is no longer significant (B = −0.003, p = 0.352) with only one partner. As noted in the discussion, this interaction term was relatively modest in magnitude even with the full sample, and paired with the findings discussed here, we thus avoided making too strong of conclusions regarding this potential interaction at the daily level.

Additional information

Funding

This publication is based on data from the study “Orienting People Toward Forgiveness”, funded by the John Templeton Foundation (No. 46712). Preparation of this manuscript was supported by the same grant. Mathias Allemand and Marko Katana are associated with the URPP “Dynamics of Healthy Aging” at the University of Zurich. Financial support by the Jacobs Foundation helped to conduct this research.