Forgivingness, Forgivability, and Relationship‐Specific Effects in Responses to Transgressions in Indian Families

Family conflict has a deleterious influence on the physical and psychological health of parents and offspring (see Amato, 2010; Beach & Whisman, 2012; Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 2005; McNeal & Amato, 1998; Rhoades, 2008). Conflicts often arise as a result of interpersonal transgressions and the motivations to respond to these transgressions are referred to as "transgression-related interpersonal motivations" (TRIMs). TRIMs have been posited to vary along three dimensions: avoidance, revenge, and benevolence (McCullough, Bellah, Kilpatrick, & Johnson, 2001; McCullough et al., 1998). That is, individuals may respond to transgressions with an increased motivation to avoid the transgressor, to retaliate against the transgressor, and to express decreased benevolence or good will toward the transgressor. With forgiveness, individuals become less avoidant, less vengeful, and more benevolent toward their transgressor (Fincham & Beach, 2002; McCullough, 2001). Forgiveness then can be operationalized as the restoration of these three TRIMs to their pretransgression levels. Willingness to forgive has been identified as effectively attenuating adverse outcomes following interpersonal conflict (e.g., Fincham, Beach, & Davila, 2007; for a review, see Fincham, Hall, & Beach, 2006). Because family relationships play an integral role in the health of family members, as well as in the economic well-being of the family (Beach & Whisman, 2012; Fincham & Beach, 2010), understanding how family members perceive and respond to conflict with forgiveness could greatly enhance family research and inform more effective family interventions. This is particularly important given the emergence of forgiveness interventions specifically targeted at couples and families (see Worthington & Jennings, 2010). But few researchers have appropriately analyzed forgiveness within a family structure, thus limiting the empirical foundation on which to build interventions. Moreover, research into relationship conflict has stressed the need for a more nuanced understanding of forgiveness. For example, McNulty (2010) emphasized the importance of contextual factors in understanding forgiveness by identifying conditions under which it has positive as well as adverse effects (see McNulty & Fincham, 2012, for discussion). In an initial study, McNulty (2008) showed that in the first 2 years of marriage forgiveness helped maintain marital satisfaction among spouses married to partners who rarely engaged in hostile behaviors, but was associated with steeper declines in satisfaction among spouses married to partners who more frequently engaged in hostile behaviors. In a similar vein, McFarland, Smith, Toussaint, and Thomas (2012) found that the relationship between forgiveness and health was negative for people who lived in more dilapidated or run-down conditions and positive for those who lived in more affluent conditions.Integral to this more nuanced understanding of forgiveness is the need to understand the interpersonal factors that contribute to people's willingness to forgive. Consistent with this emphasis, interpersonal theory (Leary, 1957; Markey, Funder, & Ozer, 2003), as well as interdependence theory (Rusbult & Van Lange, 2003), support the need to account for the situational and relational factors that influence responses to transgressions, over and above individual differences in the willingness to forgive (forgivingness). These theories contend that individuals in dyadic interactions evaluate their interpersonal relations through interactional behaviors and their contextual environment (which in this study is their familial relationship), thus highlighting the need to evaluate the interplay between intrapersonal and interpersonal processes. This led us to hypothesize that, in addition to dispositional forgivingness, individual differences in forgivability and relationship specific motives would account for significant variance in a person's own TRIMs and partner TRIMs. …