بخشش در مدل پنج عامل بزرگ شخصیتی

Research has begun to explore the relationship of dispositional forgiveness to personality traits [McCullough, M. E., Rachal, K. C., Sandage, S. J., Worthington Jr., E. L., Brown, S. W., & Hight, T. L. (1998). Interpersonal forgiving in close relationships II: theoretical elaboration and measurement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(6), 1586–1603.]. Personality research has generally focused on the Big Five model of personality, but there is evidence that prediction in personality is aided by using the underlying primary factors of the Big Five. This study examined, in students from religious and public universities, the relationships of five and 16 factors of personality to four dimensions of dispositional forgiveness — forgiveness of others, receiving others’ forgiveness, forgiveness of self, and receiving God’s forgiveness. The results confirmed that personality, particularly neuroticism versus emotional stability, correlates with many aspects of dispositional forgiveness, and that the use of a greater number of personality factors aids in understanding dispositional forgiveness.

Personality and social psychologists have begun to develop a framework to explain the dynamics involved in the relational phenomena of interpersonal forgiveness (McCullough, Worthington & Rachal, 1997). Forgiveness theorists have suggested that forgiveness research begin to examine dispositional forgiveness (McCullough, 2000 and Worthington and Wade, 1999), which personality may better predict than individual acts of forgiveness due to the principle of aggregation (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1977). Previously, a relationship between the Big Five factors of agreeableness and neuroticism versus emotional stability and a forgiveness factor which was labelled “forgiveness/non-retaliation” was found in one published empirical study (Ashton, Paunonen, Helmes & Jackson, 1998). Forgiveness has not yet been investigated with lower bandwidth measures of personality, but the use of lower level more detailed measures such as those found in 16 factor models of personality may increase specificity in prediction of real life behavior (Golberg, 1999, Mershon and Gorsuch, 1988, Paunonen, 1998 and Saucier and Ostendorf, 1999). The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between dimensions of dispositional forgiveness and personality using both the Big Five and 16 primary factors advocated by Cattell (Cattell, Saunders & Stice, 1949)and Goldberg. 1. The Big Five model of personality Personality research has centered upon five factors, termed the Big Five (Cattell, 1956, Digman and Inouye, 1986, Goldberg, 1990, Gorsuch and Cattell, 1967 and Hogan, 1986; McCrae & Costa, 1987; Norman, 1963 and Tupes and Christal, 1961). This model proposes that personality consists of five factors which summarize more detailed personality traits: Neuroticism versus Emotional Stability, Surgency/Extraversion, Openness to Experience/Intellect, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. The Big Five model of personality, though pervasive, has come under criticism in recent years from personality theorists who suggest that the use of five global factors to describe personality loses valuable information available from the primary factors underlying the Big Five (e.g. Block, 1995 and McAdams, 1992). Empirical studies have supported this claim, generally finding that the use of primary factors predicted greater variance than the Big Five alone (Mershon and Gorsuch, 1988 and Paunonen, 1998), leading Saucier and Ostendorf (1999, p. 623) to conclude that “measures of the Big Five alone under specify the domain of meaningful personality attributes”. Thus, in this study we sought to answer two questions: first, is dispositional forgiveness significantly predicted by personality, and second, whether primary factors of the Big Five were more predictive of forgiveness than the Big Five themselves. With those goals in mind, we offer the following hypotheses concerning personality and dimensions of forgiveness. 2. Hypotheses regarding personality and forgiveness Forgiveness theorists have suggested that the experience of forgiveness is different if one is forgiving another, receiving another’s forgiveness, forgiving oneself, or receiving God’s forgiveness (Enright and The Human Development Study Group, 1996, Wahking, 1992 and Walker and Doverspike, 2001). However, across each of these dimensions, forgiveness is generally considered to be a combination of affect, cognition, and behavior that motivates an individual to seek reconciliation following real or imagined wrongs. McCullough et al. (1998) hypothesized that the experience of forgiveness might be influenced by personality variables by enabling some individuals to experience pro-forgiveness relational styles, cognitions, or affect. Thus, we summarize the expected findings as follows. First, due to the tendency for individuals high in Neuroticism versus Emotional Stability to ruminate following an offense (McCullough et al., 1998), it is anticipated that individuals who score high on Neuroticism versus Emotional Stability will have the most difficulty with forgiveness of others, forgiveness of self, and receiving others’ forgiveness. Second, because persons scoring high on Agreeableness, by definition, are trusting and sympathetic, it is anticipated that there will be a positive association between Agreeableness and both forgiveness of others and receiving others’ forgiveness. Third, due to the strong relation between Surgency/Extraversion and both positive affect and support seeking, proactive forms of behavior (Watson and Clark, 1992 and Watson and Hubbard, 1996), it is expected that Surgency/Extraversion will significantly predict successful forgiveness of others and forgiveness of self. Fourth, because the other two factors (Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness) have been found to relate only distantly to positive affect (Watson & Clark, 1992), it is believed that those two dimensions will be largely unrelated to any of the forgiveness dimensions. Finally, we conducted exploratory analyses to compare prediction of forgiveness using the Big Five versus the underlying primary factors of the Big Five.