Tendency to Forgive Scale (TTFS)

Abstract

The Tendency to Forgive Scale (TTFS) is a psychometric self-report assessment developed by Jaquaye Russell in 2013 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to evaluate dispositional forgiveness and chronic unforgiveness among youth and adolescents. Originating as part of a specialized measurement battery designed to evaluate youth anger, forgiveness, and emotional support networks, the TTFS addresses a critical developmental window during which socio-cognitive maturation, emotional self-regulation, and interpersonal conflict resolution styles become consolidated. The instrument comprises 10 items scored on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree (with anchor points: Strongly Disagree, Mildly Disagree, Agree and Disagree equally, Mildly Agree, Strongly Agree). Rather than measuring episodic forgiveness toward a single identifiable perpetrator, the TTFS measures trait-level propensity to harbor resentment, seek retribution, rehearse transgressions, and cling to grudges over extended periods. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s α typically ranging between .81 and .87 across developmental samples), stable test-retest reliability, and clear construct validity evidenced by significant positive correlations with chronic anger, trait hostility, and rumination, alongside inverse relationships with prosocial behavior, empathy, and perceived social support. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses support a coherent unidimensional structure centered on persistent unforgivingness, while revealing functionally distinct behavioral and affective facets including grudge retention, retaliatory desires, memory intrusion, and schadenfreude. The scale provides educators, developmental researchers, and child clinical psychologists with a psychometrically sound, age-appropriate instrument for assessing socio-emotional deficits and evaluating targeted interventions such as forgiveness-based therapy and restorative justice programs.

Keywords

Tendency to Forgive Scale, TTFS, youth forgiveness, dispositional forgiveness, adolescent unforgiveness, grudge holding, rumination, retaliation, pediatric psychometrics, social-emotional development

Authors

The Tendency to Forgive Scale (TTFS) was constructed and psychometrically validated by Jaquaye Russell, Ph.D. The instrument was formally introduced in doctoral research conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee within the Department of Educational Psychology. The developmental project was supervised by faculty specializing in pediatric psychological assessment, youth behavioral health, and developmental psychopathology. Address correspondence regarding original instrument validation parameters to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Graduate School archives or the Department of Educational Psychology.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Tendency to Forgive Scale (TTFS) is to systematically capture individual differences in trait-level forgiveness and retaliatory cognitive schemas among youth populations. Interpersonal injuries, peer betrayals, social exclusion, and relational victimizations are frequent occurrences within middle childhood and adolescence. While some youths possess adaptive emotion-regulation skills that allow them to process transgressions, release negative affect, and restore relational harmony, others exhibit persistent patterns of unforgiveness characterized by angry rumination, social scorekeeping, vindictive ideation, and chronic resentment.

Historically, most psychometric instruments assessing forgiveness—such as the Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory (TRIM) or the Heartland Forgiveness Scale (HFS)—were normed and validated exclusively on adult or collegiate samples. These adult-centric inventories frequently employ sophisticated semantic constructions, highly abstract existential concepts, or complex contextual framings that lack developmental resonance when administered to youth. The TTFS was designed specifically to overcome these developmental and psychometric limitations by utilizing clear, behaviorally concrete, youth-centered language that captures how adolescents tangibly experience and manifest unforgiving tendencies.

In clinical and educational settings, the TTFS serves multiple diagnostic and evaluative functions:

• Identification of Relational Maladjustment: Youths exhibiting elevated scores on the TTFS frequently struggle with peer conflicts, externalizing aggression, oppositional defiant patterns, or internalizing depressive disorders driven by chronic resentment and hostile attributional biases.
• Evaluation of Interventions: The scale offers an objective pre- and post-intervention outcome metric for social-emotional learning (SEL) curricula, anti-bullying programs, restorative justice mediation, and clinical protocols such as Enright’s developmental forgiveness therapy.
• Delineation of Interpersonal Coping Profiles: In school psychology and juvenile justice screening batteries, the TTFS differentiates youths who engage in impulsive reactive aggression from those whose behavior is driven by premeditated, retributive, grudge-holding dispositions.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the TTFS is dispositional unforgiveness versus forgiveness within a developmental context. Forgiveness in psychometrics is operationalized not merely as the absence of overt conflict or the passive condoning of injustice, but as an active, multidimensional motivational shift wherein negative transgressor-directed cognitions, affects, and behaviors are gradually replaced by neutral or prosocial orientations (McCullough et al., 1998; Worthington, 2006). Conversely, chronic unforgiveness represents a toxic constellation of persistent anger, cognitive rehearsal of injury, retributive desires, and interpersonal mistrust.

The 10 items of the TTFS tap into several core psychological manifestations of this construct:

1. Grudge Holding and Affective Persistence

A primary marker of adolescent unforgiveness is the inability or refusal to let go of hurt, allowing acute anger to transition into enduring, crystallized resentment. Items such as “I hold grudges” and “It is hard for me to let hurtful things go” measure this emotional inertia. Furthermore, the scale incorporates external social appraisals through items like “My parents think I stay angry at others for a long time,” which captures whether the youth’s affective lingering is observable and salient to primary caregivers.

2. Cognitive Absolutism Regarding Transgressions

Unforgiving individuals often hold rigid, dichotomous beliefs regarding relational ruptures. The item “Some things you just cannot forgive” taps cognitive inflexibility, moral absolutism, and fixed mindsets regarding moral failure, which directly impede cognitive reappraisal and socio-cognitive empathy.

3. Intrusive Transgression Rumination and Memory Re-Activation

Unforgiveness is sustained through persistent cognitive rehearsal. Item 8 (“When someone does something hurtful to me, memories of the hurt surface”) directly measures involuntary memory retrieval and affective re-activation, wherein subsequent experiences or interpersonal interactions trigger vivid, emotionally charged recollections of past betrayals.

4. Retributive Motivation and Vengeance

Moving beyond internal feeling states, the construct encompasses behavioral and motivational inclinations toward behavioral retaliation. Item 6 (“When someone hurts me, I have to get even”) captures the compulsion for retributive justice, an orientation closely linked to reactive and proactive aggression in adolescent peer groups.

5. Relational Hostility, Scorekeeping, and Malicious Joy

The scale evaluates the behavioral manifestation of unforgiveness in relational settings. Item 7 (“When someone hurts me, I keep track of how many times they have hurt me”) measures relational bookkeeping and vigilance, reflecting an underlying lack of trust. Items 4 and 10 assess the communicative perpetuation of grievance—reminding offenders of past injuries and continuing to gossip or complain about past transgressions even following an explicit apology (“Even after someone says they are sorry, I talk about what they did to me”). Finally, Item 9 captures schadenfreude (“When bad things happen to people who have hurt me, I get happy”), reflecting deep-seated malicious satisfaction when an offender suffers.

Theoretical Framework

The developmental and theoretical architecture of the TTFS draws extensively from established paradigms in social-cognitive development, cognitive-behavioral models of anger, and clinical forgiveness science.

The Social-Cognitive Model of Forgiveness (Enright)

Foundational to youth forgiveness measurement is Robert Enright’s developmental model of forgiveness. Enright and colleagues demonstrated that children’s and adolescents’ understanding of forgiveness progresses through identifiable developmental stages, evolving from revengeful forgiveness (forgiving only after retribution is extracted), to restitutional forgiveness (forgiving only if restorative compensation occurs), to prosocial/unconditional forgiveness driven by shared human dignity. The TTFS reflects these developmental stages by highlighting early-to-intermediate stage constructs—specifically revenge motivations, conditional forgiveness, and retributive equity—which are developmentally pervasive in middle childhood and early adolescence.

The Stress-and-Coping / Emotional Replacement Model (Worthington)

Everett L. Worthington Jr.’s emotional forgiveness model conceptualizes unforgiveness as a chronic, stress-inducing emotional reaction comprising resentment, bitterness, hostility, hatred, and fear. Emotional forgiveness occurs when these negative emotions are systematically displaced by other-oriented positive emotions, such as empathy, compassion, or sympathy. Under this framework, the TTFS measures the failure or delay of this emotional replacement process. High TTFS scorers chronically rehearse the stress response, maintaining autonomic arousal, sympathetic activation, and hostile attributional schemas that hinder socio-emotional adaptation.

Crick and Dodge’s Social Information Processing (SIP) Model

The cognitive dynamics captured in the TTFS align closely with Crick and Dodge’s (1994) Social Information Processing (SIP) model of children’s aggressive behavior. In the SIP paradigm, individuals interpret social cues, clarify interaction goals, access potential responses from memory, and enact behavioral strategies. Youths scoring high on the TTFS exhibit systematic distortions across these steps: they demonstrate heightened recall for prior harm (encoding/interpretation), frame interpersonal goals around retribution and retribution rather than reconciliation (goal selection), and select aggressive or punitive responses (response selection).

Validity

Validation of the Tendency to Forgive Scale was conducted through psychometric evaluation alongside related socio-emotional assessment instruments, including the Level of Anger Scale (LSS) and the Anger and Support Scale (AAS), in samples of school-aged youth (Russell, 2013).

Construct and Convergent Validity

Convergent validity was established by evaluating correlations between the TTFS and empirically established correlates of interpersonal functioning. TTFS scores exhibited robust, statistically significant positive correlations with:

• Chronic and Trait Anger: Strong positive correlations (ranging from r = .52 to .68, p < .001) were demonstrated with youth anger indices, validating the premise that dispositional unforgiveness co-occurs with elevated baseline hostility and affective dysregulation.
• Hostile Rumination: Positive associations were identified with measures of depressive and aggressive rumination (r ≈ .45 to .58), confirming that high scorers repeatedly rehearse perceived grievances.
• Retaliatory Aggression: Significant positive correlations emerged with self- and peer-reported relational and overt aggressive behaviors.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been demonstrated through significant inverse associations with adaptive socio-emotional metrics:

• Perceived Social and Emotional Support: As measured by the AAS, emotional support from peers, families, and educational mentors correlated negatively with TTFS scores (r = -.34 to -.47, p < .01), illustrating that an inability to forgive erodes relational networks and perceived safety.
• Empathy and Perspective-Taking: Moderate negative associations (r = -.38 to -.50) with cognitive perspective-taking measures indicate that youths who hold persistent grudges have difficulties inferring transgressors’ circumstances or emotional states.
• Social Desirability: Low, non-significant correlations with brief impression management scales confirmed that youth responses on the TTFS are not predominantly artifacts of socially desirable reporting.

Reliability

The psychometric evaluation of the TTFS indicates high internal consistency and score stability across adolescent test administrations.

Internal Consistency

In initial developmental validation cohorts comprising middle and high school youths, the 10-item TTFS demonstrated robust internal consistency, yielding a Cronbach’s alpha (α) of .84 (with sample sub-analyses yielding coefficients between .81 and .87; Russell, 2013). Corrected item-total correlations across all 10 items remained consistently above the .40 psychometric threshold, ranging from .43 to .68. Deletion of individual items did not increase the overall scale alpha, confirming that each item substantially contributes to the unified assessment of the target construct.

Temporal Stability (Test-Retest Reliability)

Evaluations of temporal stability conducted across two- to four-week test-retest intervals revealed an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of .78, demonstrating that the TTFS captures an enduring dispositional trait rather than transient, state-dependent mood swings or temporary frustration following acute, isolated peer infractions.

Factor Analysis

During the initial scale construction, Russell (2013) subjected the initial pool of candidate items to both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and subsequent Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to establish structural validity.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal Axis Factoring (PAF) with oblique (Promax) rotation was employed to accommodate expected inter-factor correlations among cognitive, behavioral, and affective dimensions of unforgiveness. Eigenvalue inspection (> 1.0 criterion) alongside Cattell’s scree plot analysis strongly favored a prominent single dominant general factor accounting for over 42% of the common variance, supporting the operationalization of the scale as a unidimensional metric of youthful unforgiving disposition.

Factor loadings for the primary single-factor solution were strong across all items:

• Item 1 (Grudge holding): λ = .72
• Item 2 (Unforgivable beliefs): λ = .54
• Item 3 (Difficulty letting go): λ = .76
• Item 4 (Reminding transgressor): λ = .61
• Item 5 (Parental perception of anger): λ = .58
• Item 6 (Need to get even): λ = .69
• Item 7 (Scorekeeping hurtful events): λ = .64
• Item 8 (Intrusive hurt memories): λ = .62
• Item 9 (Schadenfreude): λ = .51
• Item 10 (Talking after apology): λ = .59

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analytic evaluations confirmed satisfactory model fit for the unidimensional structure when accounting for minor correlated residuals between semantically paired items (e.g., items 4 and 10 capturing communicative rehearsal):

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .94
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .92
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .058 (90% CI [.041, .074])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .049

Although a single global score is psychometrically justified, researchers often group items analytically into three correlated sub-facets: (a) Grudge Persistence & Rumination (Items 1, 3, 5, 8), (b) Vengeance & Retaliatory Joy (Items 6, 9), and (c) Relational Scorekeeping & Verbal Grievance (Items 2, 4, 7, 10).

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Tendency to Forgive Scale (TTFS)
• Author: Jaquaye Russell, Ph.D. (2013)
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil questionnaire or digital assessment
• Target Population: Youth, adolescents, and emerging adults (ages approximately 10 to 19 years; readable at a 4th-grade Lexile reading level)
• Number of Items: 10 items
• Item Content: Negative cognitive, affective, and behavioral tendencies related to unforgiveness, grudge holding, retaliation, and persistent resentment
• Response Scale (5-Point Likert):
  1. Strongly Disagree (1 point)
  2. Mildly Disagree (2 points)
  3. Agree and Disagree equally (3 points)
  4. Mildly Agree (4 points)
  5. Strongly Agree (5 points)
• Scoring Mechanics:
  • Standard Scoring (Unforgiveness Metric): All 10 items are phrased in the negative direction (unforgiveness/grudge orientation). Items can be summed directly without reverse coding to yield an overall Tendency toward Unforgiveness Score ranging from 10 to 50. Higher composite scores represent higher levels of grudge-holding, vengefulness, and inability to forgive.
  • Inverted Scoring (Forgiveness Metric): If researchers prefer an index where higher scores represent a greater tendency to forgive, all 10 items must be reverse-scored (1 = 5, 2 = 4, 3 = 3, 4 = 2, 5 = 1) prior to calculating the sum or mean score.
  • Mean Scoring: A total mean score ranging from 1.00 to 5.00 can be generated by dividing the total sum by 10.
• Completion Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Tendency to Forgive Scale was developed and published in 2013 as part of doctoral dissertation research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The full instrument, including item text and scoring parameters, is accessible in the public academic domain via institutional dissertation archives (Russell, 2013, page 118). The scale is free of cost for non-commercial research, academic, and clinical evaluation purposes, provided proper scholarly citation is maintained. Clinicians, school districts, and investigators wishing to utilize the TTFS in commercial testing platforms or for-profit publications should seek formal permission from the author and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Graduate School.

References

• Crick, N. R., & Dodge, K. A. (1994). A review and reformulation of social information-processing mechanisms in children’s social adjustment. Psychological Bulletin, 115(1), 74–101. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.115.1.74
• 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
• Fincham, F. D. (2000). The kiss of the porcupines: From attributing responsibility to forgiving. Personal Relationships, 7(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6811.2000.tb00001.x
• McCullough, M. E., Rachal, K. C., Sandage, S. J., Worthington, E. L., Jr., 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. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.6.1586
• Russell, J. (2013). Instrument Development: Youth Anger, Youth Forgiveness, and Youth Emotional Support (Doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). UWM Theses and Dissertations, Paper 264. http://dc.uwm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1269&context=etd
• Worthington, E. L., Jr. (2006). Forgiveness and reconciliation: Theory and application. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203958742

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)