The Development of Self and Other Forgiveness from Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood

The purpose of this study was to investigate the development of self, others, and situation forgiveness from adolescence to emerging adulthood. To this end, 395 individuals, aged 12 to 25 years in four age groups living in Isfahan, Iran, were selected by cluster (for the first three groups) and available sampling (for the fourth group). The study was a cross-sectional study with using the causal-comparative design and the required data were collected with the Forgiveness Scale. The results of the analysis of variance showed that forgiveness of self had a slight decreasing trend from the beginning of adolescence to adulthood. The results also revealed that forgiveness of others declined from 12 to 16 years of age, however, it increased in emerging adulthood. Moreover, the changes in situation forgiveness were not significant in four groups. Eta squared results showed a small effect of age on the forgiveness of self (2%) and forgiveness of others (4%). Finally, there was no significant gender difference in the forgiveness of self and others in different age groups.