Forgiveness in Romantic Relationships: The Roles of Attachment, Empathy, And Revenge-Seeking

Abstract

Empathy, revenge-seeking, and attachment style are psychological and emotional processes related to forgiveness in romantic relationships that the author will discuss in this paper. The study employs both the attachment theory and emotional processing in examining the predictive power of these constructs in forgiveness following wronging in a relationship. It adopted a cross-sectional quantitative research design and employed a standardized self-report measure that was examined among 249. The correlation and regression tests showed empathy was the strongest significant positive predictor of forgiveness and surprisingly revenge seeking also had a significant positive correlation with forgiveness. The research is not only adding value to the relationship psychology theory, but also providing practical recommendations towards the direction of enhancing such relationship healing in form of empathy-based and emotional regulation methods to therapists and counselors. Such limitations as self-report data and demographically limited sample have been suggested and the directions of the future investigation are longitudinal studies and mixed methods designs to help achieve a broader generalization.