گذشت و بهزیستی ذهنی در بزرگسالی: نقش تعدیل چشم انداز زمان آینده

Abstract This cross-sectional study tested the hypothesis that future time perspective moderates the association between forgivingness and subjective well-being. Results from a sample of adults (N = 962, 19–84 years) indicate that time perspective and forgivingness were strongly associated with positive affect, life satisfaction and optimism. In support of the hypothesis, forgivingness was more strongly associated with positive well-being for those who perceived their future time as limited as compared to those with an open-ended time perspective. The moderating effect of future time perspective holds over and above the effect of chronological age. Moderating effects were not found for negative affect and pessimism. The results underscore the importance of perceived time horizons for the interplay between forgivingness and well-being.

Introduction Theoretical and empirical work suggests that forgiveness is associated with subjective well-being (McCullough, 2000 and Toussaint and Webb, 2005). Cross-sectional studies have evidenced positive associations between the dispositional tendency to forgive others and various indicators of subjective well-being. For example, forgiving individuals report more positive affect, greater life satisfaction, optimism, happiness, environmental mastery, and self-acceptance (Hill and Allemand, 2010, Hill and Allemand, 2011a, Krause and Ellison, 2003, Maltby et al., 2005 and Sastre et al., 2003). By contrast, forgiving individuals tend to be less prone to negative affect, anxiety and depressive symptoms (Berry et al., 2005, Brown, 2003 and Thompson et al., 2005). Moreover, longitudinal research has demonstrated that changes in forgiveness are positively related to changes in subjective well-being and adjustment, and negatively to changes in negative affect and physical symptoms (Bono et al., 2008 and Orth et al., 2008). Finally, findings from experimental and intervention studies support the forgiveness and well-being relation as well (Karremans et al., 2003 and Worthington et al., 2007). As research continues to find a significant positive association between forgiveness and subjective well-being, it raises questions about conditions that might change this relationship. Accordingly, one direction for research is to understand potential moderators of this association. The present study thus sought to investigate future time perspective as a potential moderator for the associations between dispositional forgiveness and various indicators of subjective well-being.

3. Results Means, standard deviations, and correlations among study variables are depicted in Table 1. Forgiving individuals tended to be higher on positive affect, satisfaction with life, optimism, and lower on negative affect and pessimism (see Hill & Allemand, 2011a for a fuller presentation of these results). Future time perspective was positively related to indicators of positive subjective well-being such as satisfaction with life, and negatively to indicators of negative well-being such as negative affect. This indicates that individuals viewing their future as open-ended tended to have a better subjective well-being than those individuals who view their future as limited. Future time was unrelated to forgivingness (r = −0.02). In line with other research (e.g., Lang & Carstensen, 2002), future time perspective was found to be strongly negatively related to chronological age (r = −0.66, p < .001). Moreover, women tended to perceive their future as slightly more open-ended than men (r = 0.10, p < 0.05). Table 1. Means, standard deviations, and correlations for variables of interest. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1. Forgivingness – 2. Positive affect 0.25⁎⁎ – 3. Negative affect −0.31⁎⁎ −0.68⁎⁎ – 4. Satisfaction with life 0.23⁎⁎ 0.70⁎⁎ −0.59⁎⁎ – 5. Optimism 0.26⁎⁎ 0.53⁎⁎ −0.44⁎⁎ 0.46⁎⁎ – 6. Pessimism −0.12⁎⁎ −0.38⁎⁎ 0.32⁎⁎ −0.42⁎⁎ −0.31⁎⁎ – 7. Future time perspective −0.02 0.39⁎⁎ −0.19⁎⁎ 0.32⁎⁎ 0.35⁎⁎ −0.29⁎⁎ – 8. Age 0.22⁎⁎ −0.06 −0.10⁎ −0.03 −0.04 0.23⁎⁎ −0.66⁎⁎ – 9. Gender (0 = male, 1 = female) −0.12⁎⁎ 0.02 0.13⁎⁎ −0.01 −0.05 −0.11⁎ 0.10⁎ −0.18⁎⁎ – Potential range 1–7 1–5 1–5 1–6 1–5 1–5 1–5 19–84 – Mean 3.82 3.92 2.14 4.51 3.74 2.41 3.09 52.40 – SD 1.13 0.60 0.61 0.95 0.67 0.72 0.86 17.65 – Note: N = 962; the correlations with gender are point biserial correlations. ⁎ p < 0.01. ⁎⁎ p < 0.001. Table options Table 2 and Table 3 contain the results of the regression models. The findings indicate strong effects for forgivingness and future time perspective as predictors of subjective well-being controlled for age and gender. Future time perspective seems to be an even stronger predictor of well-being than forgivingness. Perhaps more important, we found support for the moderation hypothesis. The interaction effects in Table 2 were significant, although weak with respect to explained variance. For ease of presentation, we discuss the results of the tests for the proposed interaction effects separately for the indicators of positive and negative subjective well-being as outcome variables. Table 2. OLS regression estimating indicators of positive subjective well-being from forgivingness, future time perspective, and their interaction, controlling for age and gender. Unstandardized (B) and standardized (b) regression coefficients are reported. Positive affect Satisfaction with life Optimism B SE b t B SE b t B SE b t Constant 3.90 0.03 – 150.90⁎⁎⁎ 4.51 0.04 – 104.60⁎⁎⁎ 3.76 0.03 – 125.32⁎⁎⁎ Age (W1) 0.01 0.00 0.29 7.30⁎⁎⁎ 0.01 0.00 0.26 6.28⁎⁎⁎ 0.01 0.00 0.26 6.42⁎⁎⁎ Gender (W2) 0.04 0.04 0.03 1.18 0.01 0.06 0.01 0.20 −0.04 0.04 −0.03 −0.97 Forgivingness (F) 0.10 0.02 0.20 6.76⁎⁎⁎ 0.15 0.03 0.18 5.69⁎⁎⁎ 0.13 0.02 0.21 7.01⁎⁎⁎ FTP (M) 0.40 0.03 0.58 15.13⁎⁎⁎ 0.55 0.04 0.49 12.44⁎⁎⁎ 0.41 0.03 0.52 13.47⁎⁎⁎ F × M −0.04 0.02 −0.07 −2.44⁎ −0.08 0.03 −0.08 −2.78⁎⁎ −0.06 0.02 −0.08 −2.88⁎⁎ Note: FTP: Future time perspective; the focal predictor (F), moderator (M), and control variable (W1) were mean centered prior to the analyses; positive affect: R2 = 0.26, F(5, 933) = 66.39, p < 0.0001, R2inter = 0.01, F = 5.97, p < 0.05; satisfaction with life: R2 = 0.20, F(5, 933) = 45.84, p < 0.0001, R2inter = 0.01, F = 7.73, p < 0.01; optimism: R2 = 0.23, F(5, 935) = 57.38, p < 0.0001; R2inter = 0.01, F = 8.30, p < 0.01. ⁎ p < 0.05. ⁎⁎ p < 0.01. ⁎⁎⁎ p < 0.001. Table options Table 3. OLS regression estimating indicators of negative subjective well-being from forgivingness, future time perspective, and their interaction, controlling for age and gender. Unstandardized (B) and standardized (b) regression coefficients are reported. Negative affect Pessimism B SE b t B SE b t Constant 2.07 0.03 – 74.65⁎⁎⁎ 2.47 0.03 – 71.83⁎⁎⁎ Age (W1) −0.01 0.00 −0.28 −6.83⁎⁎⁎ 0.00 0.00 0.10 2.39⁎ Gender (W2) 0.12 0.04 0.10 3.22⁎⁎ −0.12 0.05 −0.08 −2.62⁎ Forgivingness (F) −0.13 0.02 −0.24 −7.83⁎⁎⁎ −0.10 0.02 −0.15 −4.65⁎⁎⁎ FTP (M) −0.27 0.03 −0.38 −9.55⁎⁎⁎ −0.18 0.04 −0.22 −5.12⁎⁎⁎ F × M 0.03 0.02 0.05 1.62 0.02 0.02 0.03 0.91 Note: FTP: Future time perspective; the focal predictor (F), moderator (M), and control variable (W1) were mean centered prior to the analyses; negative affect: R2 = 0.19, F(5, 927) = 43.48, p < 0.0001, R2inter = 0.002, F = 2.61, p > 0.10; pessimism: R2 = 0.11, F(5, 933) = 23.76, p < 0.0001, R2inter = 0.001, F = 0.82, p > 0.10. ⁎ p < 0.05. ⁎⁎ p < 0.01. ⁎⁎⁎ p < 0.001. Table options 3.1. Indicators of positive subjective well-being 3.1.1. Positive affect The results in Table 2 (column 1) reveal that the combined effects of forgivingness and future time perspective on positive affect are statistically significant (B = −0.04, t(933) = −2.44, p < 0.05). This implies that the impact of forgivingness depends on the level of perceived time perspective. The unstandardized coefficient associated with the multiplicative term suggests that for individuals one unit higher on future time perspective, the coefficient for forgivingness predicting positive affect is 0.04 less (see Fig. 1). As expected the strength of association between forgivingness and positive affect is larger for participants with limited time perspective (B = 0.14, SE = 0.02, t(933) = 6.69, p < 0.001, 95% CI = 0.10; 0.18) and indefinite time perspective (B = 0.10, SE = 0.02, t(933) = 6.76, p < 0.001, 95% CI = 0.07; 0.13) than for participants with an open-ended time perspective (B = 0.07, SE = 0.02, t(933) = 3.33, p < 0.001, 95% CI = 0.03; 0.11). The regression model explained 26% of variance in positive affect, whereby 1% of the variance in the outcome variable was uniquely attributable to the interaction ( Table 2). Although the interaction effect is weak in terms of explained variance, it should be noted that effect sizes for moderator effects are generally rather small ( Chaplin, 1991 and Chaplin, 2007). Indicators of positive subjective well-being as functions of forgivingness and ... Fig. 1. Indicators of positive subjective well-being as functions of forgivingness and future time perspective. Future time perspective values are the sample mean and +/− one SD from the mean. Low and high forgivingness reflect forgivingness value end-points. Figure options 3.1.2. Life satisfaction We evidenced a significant interaction between forgivingness and future time perspective with respect to life satisfaction as outcome variable (B = −0.08, t(933) = −2.78, p < 0.01) ( Table 2). The interaction is visualized in Fig. 1. The strength of the positive relationship between forgivingness and life satisfaction was stronger among those participants with limited time perspective (B = 0.21, SE = 0.03, t(933) = 6.12, p < 0.001, 95% CI = 0.14; 0.28) and indefinite time perspective (B = 0.15, SE = 0.03, t(933) = 5.69, p < 0.001, 95% CI = 0.10; 0.20) as compared to those participants with an open-ended time perspective (B = 0.08, SE = 0.04, t(933) = 2.32, p < 0.05, 95% CI = 0.01; 0.15). The regression model explained 20% of variance in satisfaction with life. The interaction term uniquely predicted 1% of variance ( Table 2). 3.1.3. Optimism As can be seen from Table 2, forgivingness and future time perspective significantly interact (B = −0.05, t(935) = −2.88, p < 0.01) in predicting optimism ( Fig. 1). Again, the results show that the strength of association between forgivingness and optimism is larger for participants with limited time perspective (B = 0.17, SE = 0.02, t(935) = 7.16, p < 0.001, 95% CI = 0.13; 0.22) and indefinite time perspective (B = 0.13, SE = 0.02, t(935) = 7.01, p < 0.001, 95% CI = 0.09; 0.16) than for participants with an open-ended time perspective (B = 0.08, SE = 0.02, t(935) = 3.21, p < 0.01, 95% CI = 0.03; 0.13). The predictors explained 23% of variance in optimism, whereby the interaction predicted 1% of the variance ( Table 2). 1 3.2. Indicators of negative subjective well-being 3.2.1. Negative affect Forgivingness and future time perspective did not interact in predicting negative affect (Table 3). That is, the negative association between forgivingness and negative affect did not statistically significantly vary as a function of future time perspective. Forgivingness remained a significant predictor even when controlling for future time perspective and the interaction. In contrast to the results for indicators of positive subjective well-being, gender was a significant positive predictor of negative affect, suggesting that females tended to show a higher negative affect. Gender did not interact with forgivingness in predicting negative affect. 3.2.2. Pessimism Similar to negative affect, we did not evidence an interaction between forgivingness and future time perspective in predicting pessimism, implying that the negative association between forgivingness and pessimism did not vary as a function of future time perspective (Table 3). Forgivingness remained a significant predictor even after controlling for the other variables. Gender negatively predicted pessimism, implying that men tended to demonstrate higher scores in pessimism. Gender did not interact with forgivingness in predicting pessimism.