Relational spirituality and forgiveness: development of the Spiritual Humility Scale (SHS).

Davis, Don E. ; Hook, Joshua N. ; Worthington, Everett L., Jr. 等

Research on spirituality and forgiveness has begun to examine the types of dynamic, spiritual experiences that can promote forgiveness. Specifically, we explore how victims may see an offender's humility in relationship with the Sacred, and how this appraisal affects forgiveness. We also describe the development of the Spiritual Humility Scale (SHS). In Study 1 (N= 300; F = 166, M = 134), the SHS had a single-factor structure using exploratory factor analysis. In Study 2 (N= 150), the factor structure replicated and evidence supporting construct validity was adduced. Specifically, the SHS was moderately correlated with other spiritual appraisals and with judgments of general humility. It was correlated with forgiveness, even after controlling for other spiritual appraisals. This relationship was moderated by religious commitment, such that appraising spiritual humility affected forgiveness for those high, but not low, in religious commitment.

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In recent years, the study of forgiveness has flourished (for reviews see McCullough, Pargament, & Thoresen, 2000; Worthington, 2005). The role of spirituality in forgiveness has received increased attention. Ten years ago, McCullough and Worthington (1999) noticed a discrepancy. Research showed that people who were more spiritual (typically religious spirituality) reported being more forgiving than people who were less spiritual, but they did not consistently report more forgiveness of a specific offense. This discrepancy led researchers to explore more nuanced hypotheses regarding how spirituality affects forgiveness (see Tsang, McCullough, & Hoyt, 2005). Accordingly, researchers have begun to change the way they study the relationship between spirituality and forgiveness.

Until recently, most studies on spirituality and forgiveness measured spirituality as a personality trait. Essentially, they asked if spiritual people are more likely to forgive than are people who are not spiritual. Now researchers are asking, for those who are spiritually committed, what spiritual experiences tend to promote or hinder forgiveness? They are beginning to focus on how victims spiritually respond to a transgression. For instance, victims may see a transgression as having spiritual meaning, feel angry at God (Exline, Yali, & Lobel, 1999), or pray for help from God (Krumrei, Mahoney, & Pargament, 2008).

A Model of Relational Spirituality and Forgiveness

We recently proposed a model of relational spirituality and forgiveness (see Davis, Hook, & Worthington, 2008). It describes how victims see a transgression through a spiritual lens. They perceive the relationship of the Sacred with themselves, the offender, and the transgression itself. These perceptions evoke an emotional response. According to Worthington's (2006) stress-and-coping theory of forgiveness, emotional forgiveness occurs when the victim replaces negative emotions with positive, other-oriented emotions. Thus, spiritual experiences that evoke positive emotions should tend to promote forgiveness, but spiritual experiences that evoke negative emotions should hinder forgiveness.

The model describes spiritual appraisals of three spiritual relationships. Victims may appraise the relationship of the Sacred to the transgression, to themselves, and to the offender (see Figure 1). (a) Viewing a transgression as a desecration--such as an act of infidelity that is seen as the destruction of a holy marriage--is an example of the Sacred-transgression relationship (see TS in Figure 1). Consistent with our model, desecrations have been found to evoke negative emotions, making them particularly difficult to forgive (Davis et al., 2008). (b) Anger at God is an example of the Sacred-victim relationship (see VS in Figure 1). Anger at God can cause intense stress (Exline et al., 1999), which often hinders forgiveness. Spiritual similarity of an offender is an example of the Sacred-offender (see OS in Figure 1). Victims tend to experience greater empathy and forgiveness if they see they offender as spiritually similar, as opposed to spiritually different (Davis, Worthington, et al., 2010). Spiritual similarity is just one of many appraisals victims may make of an offender's relationship with the Sacred. In the present studies, we focus on how victims see an offender's humility before God.

Previous Research on Humility and Forgiveness

Previous research on humility and forgiveness has focused on the victim. For example, victims have been found to forgive more if they can see themselves as capable of committing a similar offense (Exline, Baumeister, Zell, Kraft, & Witvliet, 2008; Exline, Zell, Malcolm, DeCourville, & Belicki, 2008). Humility has also been found to be positively related to trait forgivingness (Powers, Nam, Rowatt, & Hill, 2007; Shepherd & Belicki, 2008). However, these results should be interpreted cautiously because researchers do not agree on a good way of measuring humility. Self-reports of humility have been harshly criticized (Tangney, 2000). Claiming to be humble--even on private self-reports that no one will see--seems like an ironic form of bragging. Researchers suspect that truly humble people will accurately or even underestimate their humility, whereas those lower in humility will overestimate their humility. Those very low in humility, such as narcissists, may overestimate their humility substantially. Given the perhaps intractable problems with self-reports of humility, researchers have explored other measures of humility (e.g., Rowatt et al., 2006; Rowatt, Ottenbreit, Nesselroade, & Cunningham, 2002). None of these alternative strategies have been widely accepted (for a review, see Davis, Worthington, & Hook, in press).

Relational Humility

In the present studies, we approached humility as a personality judgment made within a specific relationship (Davis et al., in press). An advantage of this strategy is that it aligns our model with an expansive literature on personality judgments, spanning both social and personality psychology (Funder, 1995; Kenney, 2004). Other studies have used the method to offer evidence of criterion validity for another measure of humility, but researchers have not theoretically elaborated on what it would mean to study humility from the eyes of the beholder.

We define relational humility as the degree to which an observer ascribes a target person with three qualities: (a) other-orientedness; (b) the ability to regulate self-focused emotions (e.g., pride and shame) in socially accepted ways; and (c) an accurate view of self. Moreover, observers judge humility by comparing a target person to their humility ideal, the qualities the judge would expect a perfectly humble person to express in a particular relationship context. People judge a target person's degree of humility in order to predict how they are likely to be treated in a relationship (Funder, 1995). Other-oriented emotions (e.g., empathy, sympathy, love, or guilt) may help signal humility, because they indicate that a target person is capable of considering and respecting the interests of others (Fredrickson, 1998). Thus, relational humility generally allows a relationship to deepen, whereas its absence may cause a relationship to deteriorate.

The present model suggests that relational humility can be assessed using a straight-forward measure of humility judgments. Whereas describing oneself as humble may be immodest, describing someone else as humble is not. Thus, informant reports of humility do not lead to the same paradox as do self-reports of humility. Granted, observer reports may be susceptible to other forms of bias. However, we argue that such biases are influenced by the nature of the judge's relationship with the target person, and thus they are inherent to the construct of relational humility. Related to the present studies, the victim's subjective perception of an offender's humility is hypothesized to affect forgiveness.

Appraisals of Spiritual Humility

In light of our model of relational spirituality and forgiveness (Davis et al., 2008) and our concept of relational humility (Davis et al., in press), we theorize that victims may consider an offender's humility not merely in relation to other people, but also in relation to the Sacred. That is, we hypothesize that the degree to which a victim perceives an offender as spiritually humble will facilitate greater forgiveness towards an offender. For example, Christians might think of Philippians 2, which presents Jesus as the humble ideal. He completely surrendered to God, did not claim his own honor, was obedient to God, and used his life to serve the needs of others because that was his mission from God. Thus, some Christians' humility ideal (one's idea of how perfect humility would be expressed in a given situation) might focus on the quality of spiritual humility.

Appraisals of an offender's spiritual humility may affect forgiveness in several ways. First, they may indicate that an offender is part of the victim's spiritual in-group. Individuals tend to attribute a higher level of humanness to in-group members, which can promote emotions that facilitate forgiveness such as empathy, sympathy, compassion and love for other group members (Boccato, Capazza, Falvo, & Durante, 2008).

Second, appraisals of spiritual similarity may indicate that the offender has participated in the necessary spiritual rituals or customs to seek forgiveness (e.g., offering public confession). Spiritual rituals may require humility because they publically draw attention to the offender's wrongdoing, and may hurt his or her reputation. Once the offender conforms to such norms of seeking forgiveness, the victim may sense pressure from the community to forgive (Kampf, 2008). Indeed, refusing to forgive may hurt the victims own reputation in the community.

Third, appraisals of humility may affect how the victim understands what God is doing in relation to the offender. Namely, many Christians may believe that God forgives unconditionally; however, this may take on several meanings. For example, some victims-perceiving that the offender has shown Christian-consistent contrition--may believe that God is mercifully restoring the offender, and they may decide to do likewise. Other victims may believe that God forgives in an abstract sense, but plans to bring the offender to justice through much pain and suffering. Thinly veiled in forgiving language, such a perspective bears much in common with rumination, which tends to increase unforgiveness.

A measure of spiritual humility has not been developed; thus, prior research has not directly studied how spiritual humility affects forgiveness. If we consider seeking forgiveness from God as being evidence of spiritual humility, then we can adduce indirect evidence for the hypothesis that spiritual humility promotes forgiveness. In two studies, Basset et al. (2008) had participants read a scenario about an offender's spiritual response to a transgression. In both studies, participants reported more forgiveness if the offender cultivated his or her relationship with God after a transgression (e.g., seeking forgiveness or growing spirituality) than if the offender did not.

The Present Studies

The purposes of the present studies are to (a) create a measure of spiritual humility, (b) provide evidence for basic psychometric adequacy of the scores, and (c) provide initial evidence that perceiving spiritual humility influences forgiveness.

STUDY 1

The purposes of Study 1 were to create the Spiritual Humility Scale (SHS), to use exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to drop poor items and examine the factor structure, and to provide initial evidence of internal consistency.

Method

Participants

Participants were 300 undergraduate students (166 females) from a large Mid-Atlantic urban university. The mean age was 19.1 years (SD = 2.8). The sample was ethnically diverse (57.3% White/Caucasian, 15.3% Black/African American, 18.0% Asian/Asian American, 4.0% Latino/Latina, and 4.7% Other or did not report).

Measures

Sacred Humility Scale-6 Item Version (SHS-6). The SHS-6 was created for the present study. Six items were created by the first author to assess spiritual humility of another person. The goal was to create a brief scale for research and level 1 clinical assessment (see Richards & Bergin, 2005). For research and for Level 1 clinical assessment, the premium is on brevity. The core construct of spiritual humility is best captured by the item "He/she is humble before the Sacred." Items were also created to assess the degree to which the person perceived the offender to "accept his/her place in relation to the Sacred" and to "be comfortable with his or her place in relation to the Sacred." Finally, we also assessed humility in relationship with humanity, nature, and the greater cosmos (e.g., "He/she knows his/her place in relation to nature"). Participants rated items using a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 = completely disagree to 5 = completely agree.

Procedure

Participants were recruited from undergraduate classes and participated as part of a course requirement or in exchange for partial course credit. After giving consent, participants completed the SHS-6. Following this, participants were debriefed and given the contact information of the researcher should they have any questions.

Results and Discussion

Exploratory Factor Analyses

The correlation matrix for all items of the SHS-6 was analyzed using an EFA with maximum likelihood estimation. One factor emerged with an Eigenvalue above 1, and one factor best described the data based on the Scree test (Cattell, 1966), accounting for 63.26% of the variance of the items. One item was dropped because it did not meet statistical inclusion criteria by loading at least .50 on the single factor. Another item was dropped because it was highly redundant with another item (only one word was different). Thus, the final version of the Spiritual Humility Scale (SHS) has four items (see Table 1).

TABLE 1
Exploratory Factor Analysis of the Spiritual Humility Scale (Study 1)

Items                                       M     SD    Factor loading

1. He/she accepts his/her place in         2.86  1.18       .93
   relation to the Sacred

2. He/she is comfortable with his/her      2.58  1.07       .89
   place in relation to the Sacred

3. He/she is humble before the Sacred.     2.18  1.15       .77

4. He/she knows his/her place in relation  2.87  1.15       .62
   to nature.

Note. Participants rated items using a 5-point Likert-type scale
ranging from 1 = completely disagree to 5 = completely agree.

Descriptive statistics and factor loadings for the SHS are listed in Table 1. The Cronbach's alpha for the scale was .84. Psychometrician Devellis (2003) suggests that an alpha of about 0.80 is ideal for a research instrument; 0.90 probably indicates too much redundancy. The results from Study 1 provide evidence of a one-factor structure for the SHS with good estimated internal consistency. However, items were dropped based on the characteristics of the current sample. Thus, it is important to replicate the factor structure on an independent sample to provide evidence that the factor structure generalizes to other samples.

After establishing the basic SHS-4 scale in Study 1, we sought to replicate and confirm the factor structure using an independent sample. Additionally, we sought to provide more evidence for its estimated internal consistency. Finally, we sought to provide evidence for construct validity, as well as convergent and discriminant validity.

STUDY 2

After conducting a CFA, we investigated some predictors of whether a victim had experienced forgiveness of a specific transgression. Potential predictors included relational humility judgments, spiritual similarity, and spiritual humility. In addition, we investigated whether religious commitment moderated the relationship between spiritual humility and forgiveness, such that the relationship was stronger for higher, compared with lower, religious commitment.

Method

Participants

Participants were 150 undergraduate students (95 females) from a large Mid-Atlantic urban university. The mean age was 18.9 years (SD = 1.5). The sample was ethnically diverse (53.9% White/Caucasian, 17.1% Black/African American, 19.1% Asian/Asian American, 2.6% Latino/Latina, and 7.2% Other or did not report).

Measures

Sacred Humility Scale (SHS). Victims' appraisals of an offender's spiritual humility were assessed with the final four-item version of the SHS developed in Study 1. (Alphas for all measures are reported in Table 2.)

TABLE 2
Means, SD, Alphas, and Intercorrelations of SHS with Other Constructs
(Study 2)

                           M       SD     N   [alpha]  SH  SS     HS

Spiritual Humility         11.26   4.21  150  .85          .46 *  .25 *
Judgments (SH)

Spiritual Similarity of    13.09   7.78  151  .86                 .53 *
Offender (SS)

Human Similarity of        11.63   6.16  150  .78
Offender (HS)

Humility judgments (HUM)   13.75   5.67  150  .94

Avoidance (AV)             19.34   9.01  151  .94

Revenge (REV)               9.77   5.13  149  .90

Unforgiveness (UNF)        29.10  12.71  148  .93

Religious Commitment (RC)  24.37  10.84  145  .95

Trait Gratitude (TG)       27.34   6.06  145  .86

                          HUM     AV      REV     UNF    RC     TG

Spiritual Humility       .42 *  -.25 *  -.22 *  -.26 *  .06     .22 *
Judgments (SH)

Spiritual Similarity of  .36 *  -.31 *  -.16    -.28 *  .25 *   .11
Offender (SS)

Human Similarity of      .30 *  -.31 *  -.25 *  -.32 *  .34 *   .16
Offender (HS)

Humility judgments              -.41 *  -.32 *  -.43 *  -.18    .02
(HUM)

Avoidance (AV)                           .57 *   .95 *  -.08   -.02

Revenge (REV)                                    .81 *  -.13   -.24 *

Unforgiveness (UNF)                                     -.11   -.11

Religious Commitment                                            .11
(RC)

Trait Gratitude (TG)

* p < .01
Note. SH = Spiritual Humility Judgments; SS = Spiritual Similarity of
Offender; HS = Human Similarity of Offender; Hum = Humility Judgments;
AV = Avoidance motivations; REV = Revenge motivations;
UNF = Unforgiveness motivations (sum of AV and REV); RC = Religious
Commitment; TG = Trait gratitude

Relational Humility Scale (RHS). The Global humility subscale of the RHS was used to assess the degree to which participants considered the offender to be humble (5 items: he/she has a humble character, he or she is truly a humble person, most people would consider him/her a humble person, his or her close friends would consider him/her humble, and even strangers would consider him/her humble). Items were answered using a 5-point scale ranging from 1 = completely disagree to 5 = completely agree. In Davis, Hook, et al. (2010) Cronbach's alphas for the subscale ranged from .88-.92. Scores on the RHS for relational humility were found to be positively correlated with empathy with an offender, positive emotions toward a parent, and traits of forgivingness, and gratitude, and were negatively related to negative emotions toward a parent and avoidant attachment style.

Similarity of an Offender's Spirituality Scale (SOS; Davis, Worthington, et al., 2010). The 9-item SOS was used to assess a victim's perception of an offender's relationship with the Sacred. Participants responded to items on a 7-point scale ranging from 0 = completely disagree to 6 = completely agree. The SOS has two subscales, one indicating spiritual similarity and one indicating human similarity. An example item for the Spiritual Similarity subscale is "I thought about how similar my basic religious beliefs were to his/hers." An example item for the Human Similarity subscale is "I thought to myself that this person was a brother/sister human." Cronbach's alphas ranged from .87-93 for Spiritual Similarity and from .79-.86 for Human Similarity (Davis, Worthington, et al., 2010). The SOS also showed evidence of construct validity. The SOS was correlated with religious commitment, other measures of religiosity, empathy, and forgiveness.

Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory (TRIM; McCullough et al., 1998). The 12-item TRIM was used to measure unforgiving and forgiving motivations towards a specific offender. The TRIM consists of two subscales, one measuring avoidance motivations and one measuring revenge motivations. Participants rate each item (e.g., "I'll make him or her pay") on a 5-point scale from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. Cronbach's alphas ranged from .84 to .93 for the avoidance and revenge subscales (McCullough et al., 1998).

Religious Commitment Inventory (RCI-10; Worthington et al., 2003). The 10-item RCI-10 was used to assess one's commitment to a religion. Participants rate their agreement with each item on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 = not at all true of me to 5 = totally true of me. An example item is, "My religious beliefs lie behind my whole approach to life." In a variety of samples, Worthington et al. (2003) found Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranging from .88 to .98. Estimates of temporal stability (3 week and 5 month) were .84 to .87. The RCI-10 also showed evidence of construct validity (Worthington et al., 2003).

The Gratitude Questionnaire (GQ-6; McCullough, Emmons, & Tsang, 2002). The six-item GQ-6 was used to assess dispositional gratitude. Participants complete items on a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree. An example item is "I have so much in life to be thankful for." Cronbach's alpha estimates for the six-item totals have ranged from .76 to .84 (McCullough et al., 2002). In addition, the scale has shown evidence of construct validity, being related to positive emotions, life satisfaction, vitality, and optimism, trait empathy, and forgiveness, religious commitment, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (McCullough et al., 2002).

Procedure

Participants were recruited from undergraduate classes and participated as part of a course requirement or in exchange for partial course credit. After giving consent, participants recalled the offense that was currently most hurtful to them. They completed questionnaires, were debriefed, and were given the contact information of the researcher should they have any questions.

Results and Discussion

Replicated Factor Structure

Means, standard deviations, alphas, and inter-correlations of measures are described in Table 2. To replicate the factor structure of the SHS, the covariance matrix of the four items was analyzed with Maximum likelihood (ML) estimation using MPLUS 8.1. Several fit indices were examined to evaluate the overall fit of SEM models--namely, the Chi-square value, the comparative fit index (CFI), and the root-mean-square-error-approximation (RMSEA). A non-significant [[chi].sup.2], CFI above .95, and an RMSEA less than .08 suggest acceptable fit. The one factor model showed acceptable fit, [[chi].sup.2] (2) = .88, p = .64; CFI = .99; and RMSEA = .04.

Evidence for Construct Validity

To provide evidence of construct validity, we examined the relationships between the SHS and other constructs. Judgments of spiritual humility on the SHS were positively related to general humility judgments (HUM; r = .42) and appraisals of spiritual (SS; r = .46) and human similarity (HS; r = .25) of the offender (see Table 2).

Judgments of spiritual humility on the SHS predicted avoidance (AV; r = -.25) and revenge (REV; r = -.22) motivations toward the offender (see Table 2). In addition, we conducted two hierarchical regression models to see whether the SHS predicted unforgiving motivations above and beyond spiritual and human similarity (as measured by the SOS). In the first analysis, revenge was entered as the criterion variable, the subscales of the SOS were entered in a first step, and the SHS was entered in a second step. The first step accounted for 6% of the variance in forgiveness scores, F(2,144) = 4.72, p < .01 As predicted, the SHS accounted for an additional 3% variance above and beyond spiritual and human similarity, [DELTA]F(1,143) = 4.44, p < .05. In the second analysis, avoidance was entered as the criterion variable. The predictor variables were entered in the same order. The SHS did not incrementally predict avoidance scores.

Moderation between Spirituality and Forgiveness

We also tested whether the relationship between spiritual humility and forgiveness was moderated by religious commitment. A hierarchical regression was conducted in which unforgiveness (avoidance and revenge scores summed) was entered as the dependent variable, centered scores of religious commitment and spiritual humility were entered in a first step, and an interaction term was entered in the second step. The first step accounted for 6% of the variance in forgiveness scores, F(2,137) = 4.71 p < .05. Only spiritual humility was a significant predictor of unforgiveness, [beta] = -.23, p < .01 The interaction term predicted an additional 3% variance in the second step, F( 1,136) = 5.34, p < .05. Significance tests of simple slopes revealed that the relationship between judgments of spiritual humility and forgiveness was positive and significantly different from zero at high levels of religious commitment (+1 SD, [beta] = -.39, p < .001). However, this relationship was not significantly different from zero at low levels of religious commitment (-1 SD, [beta] = -.04, p = .69). The results support the hypothesis that as the religious commitment of the participant increases, judgments of the spiritual humility of the offender are more important in predicting forgiveness.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

In the current studies, we created the Spiritual Humility Scale (SHS). The scale assesses the extent to which respondents judge someone else to be humble in relation to the Sacred. In addition, we used this measure to explore a model of relational spirituality. We used the SHS as one way of measuring how the victim appraises an offender's relationship with the Sacred. Study 1 described the scale construction of the SHS. A single factor was found in Study 1 and replicated in Study 2. The

SHS also showed evidence of internal consistency, with Cronbach's alphas ranging from .84 to .86, and it showed initial evidence of construct validity. A practical issue with studying relational spirituality is that it requires several assessments regarding a single transgression--at least a forgiveness measure and one measure for each appraisal in the model. Thus, a strength of the SHS is its brevity

In Study 2, we found additional evidence that humility is important to forgiveness. Our approach differed from previous approaches (e.g., Exline, Baumeister, et al., 2008; Powers et al., 2007; Rowatt et al., 2006; Shepherd & Belicki, 2008). Instead of assessing the humility of the victim, we examined the victim's perception of the offender's humility, both general and spiritual. The strategy bypasses the inherent problems with self-reports of humility.

The finding that spiritual humility was related to forgiveness follows a trend in previous research. Namely, spirituality has generally predicted forgiveness of a specific offense better when measured as a dynamic experience--appraisals of spiritual humility (the present research), spiritual similarity (see Davis, Worthington, et al., 2010), anger at God (Exline et al., 1999), or viewing a transgression as a desecration (Pargament, Magyar, Benore, & Mahoney, 2005)--than when measured as a personality trait (e.g., religious commitment; McCullough & Worthington, 1999; Tsang et al., 2005).

Finally, we provided additional support for Worthington's (1988) theorizing regarding religious commitment. He suggested that highly religious people tend to view the world through spiritual categories, such as relationships to spiritual authority or religious in-groups. Spiritual humility was positively related to forgiveness, but only for those who were high in religious commitment. Thus, appraisals of relational spirituality tend to be more important for those who consider spirituality an important aspect of their lives.

Limitations

The present studies had several limitations. First, only self-report instruments were used. We did not examine how appraisals of spiritual humility were associated with humility-related behaviors of the offender. In fact, we did not gather any data from the offender, and thus we were unable to examine the self-other agreement of humility or spiritual humility judgments. Second, cross-sectional, correlational designs were used. Most likely, appraisals of spiritual humility change over time. It is important for researchers to consider the reactivity of such appraisals over time and how such changes affect changes in forgiveness. Third, only college students were studied. It is important to examine spiritual humility in explicitly religious contexts, both in Christians and in other religious populations.

Future Research

In recent years, relational spirituality has become increasingly important (Desrosiers & Miller, 2007; Hall & Coe, 2009; Hall, Edwards, & Slater, 2003). Shults and Sandage (2006) put forth a model of relational spirituality, which has been elaborated (Davis et al., 2008; see Figure 1 for a graphic depiction of the model). As measures have begun to be developed, the elements of the model have begun to be tested (Davis, Worthington, et al., 2010).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Now that a measure of spiritual humility has been developed, researchers can now begin to programmatically study appraisals of spiritual humility within relationships. Researchers should begin to explore the avenue by which spiritual humility affects forgiveness. For example, we hypothesize that perceiving spiritual humility will tend to promote empathy and other positive emotions in the victim, leading to forgiveness. In addition, groups may have rituals that indicate spiritually humility (e.g., publically praying for forgiveness in a small group or seeking counseling and advice from a religious leader). We hypothesize that more costly rituals (as perceived by the victim) will generally lead to higher appraisals of spiritual humility (Kampf, 2008). Furthermore, spiritual humility may affect the victim's attributions regarding the offender. For example, victims may tend to make less globally negative attributions towards an offender who is viewed as more spiritually humble. Furthermore, spiritual humility may be associated with the victim feeling that the offender accountable to God. As a result, the victim may experience greater confidence and hope that the relationship will improve.

Conclusion

In the past 10 years, the focus of research on spirituality and forgiveness has shifted, as researchers have begun to study how various spiritual experiences affect the unfolding of forgiveness. As research accumulates, new theory and empirical findings will provide counselors and religious leaders with practical knowledge on how to help spiritual individuals forgive. The findings of the current study open up some interesting possibilities for spiritual counselors and leaders. Providing people with ways to show humility sincerely, before God and towards the victim, may be an important way to help promote forgiveness.

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AUTHORS

DAVIS, DON, E. Address: Department of Psychology Box 842018, 806 West Franklin Street, Richmond, VA 23284-2018. Email: Don E. Davis (davisde@vcu.edu). Title: Doctoral student, Counseling Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University. Degrees: MA, Clinical Psychology, Psychological Studies Institute (currently named Richmont University; MA, Counseling Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University. Clinical internship, Clemson University. Areas of Specialization: Forgiveness, humility, and spirituality and religion, and marriage and family.

HOOK, JOSHUA, N. Address: Department of Psychology Box 842018, 806 West Franklin Street, Richmond, VA 23284-2018. Email: Joshua N. Hook (hookjn@vcu.edu) Title: Doctoral student, Counseling Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University. Degree: MA, Counseling Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University. Clinical internship, University of Miami Counseling Center. Areas of Specialization: Forgiveness, humility, religion and spirituality, couples therapy, and addiction.

WORTHINGTON JR., EVERETT, L. Address: Department of Psychology Box 842018, 806 West Franklin Street, Richmond, VA 23284-2018. Email: Everett L Worthington, Jr. (eworth@vcu.edu). Title: Professor of Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University. Degree: PhD, Psychology (Counseling), University of Missouri-Columbia. Areas of Specialization: forgiveness, religion and spirituality in relationships and in psychotherapeutic interventions, and marriage and family issues and interventions.

VAN TONGEREN, DARYL, R. Address: Department of Psychology Box 842018, 806 West Franklin Street, Richmond, VA 23284-2018. Email: Daryl R. Van Tongeren (vantongredr@vcu.edu). Title: Doctoral student, Social Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University. Degree: MA, Experimental Psychology, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Areas of Specialization: Meaning, morality, religion, forgiveness, and positive psychology.

GARTNER, AUBREY, L. Address: Department of Psychology Box 842018, 806 West Franklin Street, Richmond, VA 23284-2018. Email: Aubrey L. Gartner (gartneral@vcu.edu). Title: Doctoral student, Counseling Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University. Degree: MA, Counseling Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University. Areas of Specialization: Forgiveness, mercy, and couples.

JENNINGS II, DAVID, J. Address: Department of Psychology Box 842018, 806 West Franklin Street, Richmond, VA 23284-2018. Email: David J. Jennings, II (jenningsiidj@vcu.edu). Title: Doctoral student, Counseling Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University. Degrees: MA, Psychological Studies Institute (currently named Richmont University), Professional Counseling and MA, Counseling Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University. Areas of Specialization: Forgiveness, marriage and couples, and spirituality in counseling.

DON E. DAVIS, JOSHUA N. HOOK, EVERETT L. WORTHINGTON, JR., DARYL R. VAN TONGEREN, AUBREY L. GARTNER, AND DAVID J. JENNINGS II

Virginia Commonwealth University

Please address correspondence to Everett, L. Worthington Jr., Department of Psychology, Box 842018, 806 West Franklin Street, Richmond, VA 23284-2018. Email: Everett L. Worthington, Jr. (eworth@vcu.edu).