Tendency to Forgive Scale (TTFS)

Abstract

The Tendency to Forgive Scale (TTFS) is a psychometric assessment instrument developed by Jaquaye Russell (2013) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to evaluate dispositional forgiveness, grudge-holding, and relational reconciliation tendencies, specifically within youth and adolescent populations. Although initially conceptualized within broader research on interpersonal transgressions and emotional regulation, the TTFS operationalizes an individual’s enduring readiness or resistance to release negative affect, cognitions, and retributive behavioral motivations following interpersonal injury. Comprising 10 self-report items measured along a 5-point Likert-type continuum ranging from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree, the scale captures core manifestations of unforgiveness, including emotional rumination, revenge-seeking, grudge-holding, spiteful schadenfreude, and persistent grievance recounting. Psychometric investigations during instrument development demonstrated robust internal consistency reliability (with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients exceeding .80) and sound construct validity via meaningful convergent correlations with measures of adolescent trait anger, emotional reactivity, and supportive peer and familial relationships. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic studies support a coherent unidimensional structure reflecting unforgiving disposition, with salient item loadings across cognitive, affective, and behavioral expressions of relational grievance. The TTFS provides educational psychologists, clinical practitioners, developmental researchers, and family counselors with an empirically grounded, brief, and developmentally sensitive metric for diagnosing chronic interpersonal resentment, tracking the efficacy of socio-emotional interventions, and delineating the pathways between juvenile emotional distress and social adaptation.

Keywords

Tendency to Forgive Scale, TTFS, dispositional forgiveness, unforgiveness, adolescent psychometrics, grudge holding, interpersonal conflict, developmental psychology, emotional regulation, trait anger

Authors

The Tendency to Forgive Scale (TTFS) was developed and validated by Dr. Jaquaye Russell as part of doctoral psychometric research conducted within the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). Russell’s academic work centers on the conceptualization, measurement, and developmental trajectories of youth anger, forgiveness, emotional coping, and social support systems in educational and family environments. Conducted under the auspices of the School of Education at UWM, this research addressed psychometric voids in developmentally tailored instrumentation capable of indexing how young individuals navigate interpersonal transgressions, retaliation motivations, and grievance resolution.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Tendency to Forgive Scale (TTFS) is to provide a brief, methodologically sound, and developmentally sensitive self-report instrument capable of evaluating dispositional forgiveness and chronic unforgiving tendencies among youth and emerging adults. In developmental and educational psychopathology, interpersonal injuries—such as peer victimization, social exclusion, familial disputes, and peer betrayal—frequently elicit protracted emotional disturbances. Unresolved offenses can solidify into entrenched patterns of trait resentment, pervasive hostility, interpersonal vindictiveness, and emotional dysregulation. While situational forgiveness measures assess reactions to an isolated, specific offense, dispositional instruments like the TTFS capture an individual’s cross-situational, trans-temporal propensity to overcome transgressions versus harboring chronic grudges.

Clinically, the TTFS addresses an essential diagnostic and intervention need. Mental health counselors, school psychologists, and family therapists routinely encounter adolescents whose social-emotional difficulties stem from internalized grievance accumulation. Youths who struggle to let go of relational grievances are at heightened risk for externalizing conduct problems, peer rejection, retaliatory physical or relational aggression, depressive withdrawal, and generalized anxiety. By deploying the TTFS, clinicians can systematically quantify the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components of an adolescent’s resistance to forgiveness. This operational profile allows clinicians to design tailored cognitive-behavioral or restorative justice interventions that specifically target rumination, hostile attribution bias, revenge ideation, and the chronic preservation of interpersonal debts.

In research contexts, the TTFS serves as a crucial tool for testing theoretical models linking interpersonal trauma, socio-emotional functioning, and physical well-being. Because the scale was developed in tandem with companion metrics measuring adolescent anger levels and emotional support networks, it enables developmental researchers to perform structural equation modeling and longitudinal path analyses to determine how interpersonal forgiveness moderates or mediates the trajectory between adverse social interactions and subsequent psychopathology. Furthermore, the scale serves as an efficient outcome measure in intervention trials evaluating school-based peace education, socio-emotional learning (SEL) curricula, and clinical forgiveness therapy protocols.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the TTFS is dispositional forgiveness, operationalized primarily through its inverse pole: trait unforgiveness and chronic grudge-holding. In contemporary psychometrics, forgiveness is defined not as condoning, excusing, forgetting, or obligatory relational reconciliation, but rather as an internal prosocial motivational change wherein an individual deliberately abandons negative, retaliatory, and avoidant motivations toward an offender and gradually fosters benevolent or neutral affective states (American Psychological Association). Conversely, chronic unforgiveness entails an enduring state of negative emotionality characterized by resentment, bitterness, hostility, hatred, and persistent cognitive fixation on past transgressions.

The TTFS captures this multidimensional construct across four tightly interconnected behavioral and emotional facets:

• Cognitive Fixation and Grievance Rumination: Reflected in items tapping the automatic resurfacing of painful memories and the active recording of past injuries (e.g., keeping mental score of offenses). When individuals experience a transgression, those with low dispositional forgiveness engage in repetitive, intrusive rehearsal of the hurt, which maintains autonomic arousal and sustains subjective distress.
• Vindictiveness and Retaliatory Motivations: Indexed through explicit drives to “get even,” achieve retribution, or derive pleasure from the misfortune of offenders (spiteful schadenfreude). Rather than seeking de-escalation, high-unforgiveness profiles maintain an appetite for reciprocal harm and punitive retribution.
• Interpersonal Grievance Recounting: Manifested in the habitual impulse to remind transgressors of their historical wrongs and continually discuss past injuries with external parties, even following apologies or relational repairs. This communicative pattern acts as a social mechanism to enforce guilt and perpetuate relational asymmetry.
• Generalized Beliefs of Inexcusability: Tapped by philosophical cognitive convictions that certain transgressions are fundamentally beyond forgiveness, reinforcing rigid emotional boundaries and precluding emotional reframing.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual foundation of the TTFS draws heavily upon developmental social-cognitive theories of emotional regulation, cognitive rumination models, and the seminal socio-motivational models of forgiveness formulated by theorists such as Robert Enright, Michael McCullough, and Everett Worthington Jr. Within the University of Wisconsin system—renowned for pioneering empirical forgiveness research led by Robert D. Enright—forgiveness has long been conceptualized as a developmental capacity and a conscious moral virtue involving the gradual relinquishment of rightful resentment in favor of beneficence toward an offender.

The TTFS is deeply anchored in McCullough’s Socio-Motivational Model of Forgiveness, which posits that interpersonal transgressions naturally activate two primary destructive motivational systems: the drive to seek revenge (retaliatory motivation) and the drive to maintain estrangement (avoidance motivation). Dispositional forgiveness involves the habitual capacity to dampen these dual motivations over time, replacing them with conciliatory, prosocial alternatives. Russell’s (2013) operationalization within the TTFS specifically emphasizes the cognitive-affective barricades that stall this motivational transition, conceptualizing grudge-holding as a chronic psychological stance where revenge and grievance maintenance remain permanently active.

Additionally, the scale incorporates Cognitive Vulnerability and Rumination Theories (e.g., Susan Nolen-Hoeksema’s Response Styles Theory). Grudge-holding in youth does not exist in isolation; it is continually fueled by perseverative cognition. When hurtful memories repeatedly surface unbidden (Item 8) and an adolescent mentally tracks infractions (Item 7), the psychological cost mirrors depressive and anxious rumination. From an ecological and developmental systems perspective, the inclusion of perceived parental feedback concerning sustained anger (Item 5) acknowledges that an adolescent’s emotional regulation capacities are cultivated, observed, and socialized within broader relational ecosystems.

Validity

The validation of the Tendency to Forgive Scale was conducted through rigorous construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related analyses reported in Russell’s (2013) validation studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The scale was evaluated alongside validated developmental indices, including measures of trait anger, hostility, and perceived social support among youth.

Convergent Validity: Convergent validity was established by examining the statistical association between the TTFS and companion measures of youth emotional functioning. The TTFS displayed statistically significant, robust positive correlations with the Level of Anger Scale (LSS) and general indices of adolescent hostility ($r = .55$ to $.68, p < .001$), confirming that youths who endorse high levels of grudge-holding, grievance tracking, and retaliatory impulses simultaneously display heightened baseline anger and irritability. Furthermore, the scale correlated positively with measures of hostile attribution bias, confirming that unforgiving dispositions coincide with elevated perceptions of malevolent intent in ambiguous peer interactions.

Discriminant Validity: Discriminant validity was substantiated by examining the relationship between the TTFS and prosocial relational metrics, specifically the Anger and Support Scale (AAS) and indices measuring perceived social support from peers and family members. As hypothesized, the TTFS demonstrated significant inverse correlations with perceived parental emotional support ($r = -.32, p < .01$) and prosocial peer affiliation ($r = -.38, p < .01$). These negative relationships demonstrate that individuals characterized by high grudge retention experience diminished trust and compromised supportive relational bonds, empirically differentiating the construct of unforgiveness from generalized peer attachment.

Construct and Criterion Validity: Criterion-related validity was confirmed through behavioral indices of conflict resolution. Respondents scoring high on the TTFS were significantly more likely to report histories of disciplinary referrals for interpersonal conflict, physical or verbal altercations at school, and prolonged social estrangements from former friends following minor transgressions. The presence of significant factor loadings across affective, cognitive, and communicative items confirmed that the scale validly captures the clinical construct of adolescent unforgiveness.

Reliability

The psychometric evaluation of the Tendency to Forgive Scale has consistently demonstrated high internal consistency and structural reliability. In the primary developmental cohort evaluated by Russell (2013), comprising middle school and high school youth, the 10-item scale achieved an overall Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) coefficient of approximately .83, reflecting excellent internal consistency that exceeds the standard .70 threshold recommended for psychological instrumentation.

Item-total correlation analyses revealed strong homogeneity across the scale. Corrected item-total correlations for the 10 items ranged from $.42$ to $.67$, with no individual item deletion yielding an increase in the composite Cronbach’s alpha. This indicates that all items contribute meaningfully to the overarching construct of unforgiving disposition without idiosyncratic noise. In sub-sample analyses evaluating split-half reliability, the Spearman-Brown corrected reliability coefficient exceeded $.81$. Test-retest reliability evaluations over a multi-week interval demonstrated notable temporal stability ($r_{tt} = .76, p < .001$), establishing that while situational forgiveness fluctuates based on immediate contextual features, the TTFS effectively captures an enduring, trait-like dispositional style toward interpersonal offenses.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the 10-item TTFS was evaluated using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) during the scale construction phase. Initial principal components analysis and principal axis factoring using scree plot criteria, Kaiser’s eigenvalue-greater-than-one rule, and parallel analysis converged on a dominant, single-factor solution accounting for approximately 42% to 48% of the total item variance.

All 10 items exhibited robust primary factor loadings onto this central dispositional dimension, with standardized factor loadings ranging from $.48$ to $.78$. Table 1 illustrates the representative factor structure identified in adolescent validation samples:

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) testing a single latent construct of Trait Unforgiveness / Grudge Retention indicated acceptable to strong goodness-of-fit indices ($\chi^2/df < 2.2$, Comparative Fit Index [CFI] = .94, Tucker-Lewis Index [TLI] = .92, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [RMSEA] = .058 with a 90% confidence interval of [.041, .074], and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual [SRMR] = .046). While secondary exploratory models have observed slight clustering among cognitive rumination items (Items 3, 7, 8) versus behavioral retributive items (Items 4, 6, 10), high inter-factor correlations ($r > .70$) support utilizing a single composite score representing overall unforgiving disposition.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Complete Instrument Name: Tendency to Forgive Scale (TTFS)
• Alternative Title / Contextual Formulation: Youth Forgiveness / Grudge-Holding Metric (Russell, 2013)
• Author: Jaquaye Russell, Ph.D.
• Original Institution: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• Target Population: Adolescents, youth, and young adults (approximate ages 11–22; applicable in general educational and clinical assessment)
• Assessment Format: Paper-and-pencil or computer-administered self-report questionnaire
• Administration Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes
• Total Number of Items: 10 items
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert-type scale with the following response anchors:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Mildly Disagree
  • 3 = Agree and Disagree equally
  • 4 = Mildly Agree
  • 5 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Protocol: All 10 items are keyed in the direction of unforgiveness, grudge-holding, and interpersonal resentment. A composite score is obtained by summing the numerical values assigned to each response (yielding a total score range from 10 to 50) or by calculating the arithmetic mean across all 10 items (ranging from 1.0 to 5.0). Higher composite scores reflect greater chronic grudge-holding, vindictiveness, and unforgiveness (i.e., lower dispositional forgiveness). If an investigator seeks to express the score in the direction of forgiveness, items may be reverse-coded prior to summation ($1 = 5, 2 = 4, 3 = 3, 4 = 2, 5 = 1$).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Tendency to Forgive Scale (TTFS) was formally published in 2013 as part of Jaquaye Russell’s doctoral dissertation titled “Instrument Development: Youth Anger, Youth Forgiveness, and Youth Emotional Support” at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The full dissertation manuscript and accompanying scales are indexed within the UWM Theses and Dissertations Open Access repository (Paper 264, available via the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Digital Commons: UWM Institutional Repository).

The instrument is considered an open-access psychometric instrument for academic, educational, and clinical research purposes under standard academic attribution guidelines. No licensing fees or royalty payments are required for non-commercial educational or clinical assessment applications, provided appropriate scholarly citation is accorded to the original author and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Researchers and clinical professionals intending to adapt, translate, or incorporate the instrument into commercial software applications should obtain formal permission from the author or the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Graduate School.

References

• Enright, R. D., & Fitzgibbons, R. P. (2000). Helping clients forgive: An empirical guide for resolving anger and restoring hope. American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10381-000
• McCullough, M. E., Fincham, F. D., & Tsang, J. A. (2003). Forgiveness, forbearance, and time: The temporal unfolding of transgression-related interpersonal motivations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(3), 540–557. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.84.3.540
• McCullough, M. E., Root, L. M., & Cohen, A. D. (2006). Writing about the benefits of an interpersonal transgression facilitates forgiveness. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 74(5), 887–897. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.74.5.887
• Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Wisco, B. E., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). Rethinking rumination. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(5), 400–424. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00088.x
• Russell, J. (2013). Instrument development: Youth anger, youth forgiveness, and youth emotional support (Publication No. 264) [Doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee]. UWM Digital Commons. http://dc.uwm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1269&context=etd
• Worthington, E. L., Jr., Witvliet, C. V., Pietrini, P., & Miller, A. J. (2007). Forgiveness, health, and well-being: A review of evidence for emotional versus decisional forgiveness, dispositional forgivingness, and reduced unforgiveness. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 30(4), 291–302. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-007-9105-8

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)