Gratitude and Forgiveness as a Predictor of Well-Being among Female College Students

Well-being is notjust the absence of disease or illness. It is a complex combination of a person's physical, mental, emotional and social health factors. Well-being is strongly linked to happiness and life satisfaction. In short, well-being could be described as how you feel about yourself and your life. Every aspect of your life influences your state of well-being. A person's individual judgment about her/his current status about the world is possible only when person is thankful or shows gratitude for all the good thing in life and also when there is absence of negative feelings for others that is when one forgives those who have hurt her. Females in India are encouraged to be more forgiving, Example i.e College is the time when one enters into many relationships and also learns to handle failures in relationship. Therefore one has to be forgiving in order to develop a sense of well being.According to the Diener (1984; 2000; diener et al., 2002) well being considers to be the subjective evaluation of one's current status in the world. More specifically, well being involves our experience of pleasure and our appreciation of life's rewards. Diener subjective well being as a combination of positive affect (in the absence of negative affect) and general life satisfaction. Furthermore, he uses the term subjective well being as a synonym for happiness. In Ryff's view, well being is more than happiness with life. Well-being should be a source of resilience in the face of adversity and should reflect positive functioning, personal strengths, and mental health.Forgiveness: Letting Go of Grudges and Bitterness, when someone you care about hurts you, you can hold on to anger, resentment and thoughts of revenge or embrace forgiveness and move forward. Forgiveness doesn't mean that you deny the other person's responsibility for hurting you, and it doesn't minimize or justify the wrong. You can forgive the person without excusing the act. Forgiveness brings a kind of peace that helps you go on with life. According to (Thompson et al., 2005), "Forgiveness is the framing of a perceived transgression such that one's responses to the transgressor, transgression, and sequence of the transgression are transformed from negative to neutral or positive. The source of a transgression, and therefore the object of forgiveness, may be oneself, another person or persons, or a situation that one views as being beyond anyone's control.Gratitude is the master key that opens all doors of possibility. Gratitude, thankfulness, gratefulness, or appreciation is a feeling or attitude in acknowledgment of a benefit that one has received or will receive. Other work on gratitude has shown connections to other positive and pro-social constructs that are likely to enhance one's overall well-being and life satisfaction. In sum, gratitude is associated with a number ofpositive relationships and spirituality-enhancing qualities that may ultimately increase a person's sense of well-being. Gratitude is the appreciation of what is valuable and meaningful to one self and represents a general state of thankfulness and/or appreciation.Friedman (2004, 2005) Toussaint and Friedman (2006) In a clinical, adult population found that forgiveness was positively related to well-being, quality of life, life satisfaction, gratitude, positive beliefs, positive affect and emotions, optimism, self-worth, trust, hope, warmth, peace and love. Berry and Worthington (2001) found that forgiveness in undergraduates related moderately to a measure of global mental health. Generally, In adult college and clinical populations forgiveness appears to be negatively associated with negative affective states and positively associated with life satisfaction, quality of'life and well-being.Watkins et al. (2003) and Watkins (2004), using the Gratitude Scale (GRAT), reported similar findings that showed that gratitude correlated in the positive direction with life satisfaction, happiness and measures of positive affectivity and negatively with some measures of negative affectivity such as depression and hostility and physical aggression. …