Authors: Kim Watt and Rebecca Cobb
Date and Location: November 2007; Philadelphia, PA
Summary: We examined whether forgiveness mediated the association between attachment security and marital satisfaction. Attachment security is reflected by comfort with intimacy and expectations that others will be responsive and available in times of need. Attachment security, forgiveness, and relationship satisfaction are all associated, and we proposed that a mechanism that underlies the relation between attachment security and relationship satisfaction is forgiveness. Participants were 200 engaged couples from the SFU Transition to Marriage Study who completed online questionnaires 3 months prior to their wedding and 1.5 years later. Attachment security was associated with forgiveness of partner’s relationship transgressions and with relationship satisfaction. Concurrently at the beginning of the study, forgiveness did not mediate the link between attachment security and marital satisfaction. However, forgiveness did mediate the link between attachment security and changes in marital satisfaction over the first year and half of marriage. In other words, forgiveness may be a mechanism of the link between greater attachment security and increases in satisfaction over the early years of marriage.
Authors: Patrick Poyner-Del Vento and Rebecca Cobb
Date and Location: May 2007; Vancouver, BC
Summary: The degree to which one is securely attached in close relationships has been studied extensively, and experiences of one's family of origin is predictive of attachment security in adulthood. More recently, attachment security has also been shown to be predictive of forgiveness in marriage. We examined whether attachment security mediates between family environment in childhood and forgiveness in marriage. We asked couples from the Transition to Marriage Study about their experiences in childhood, how much they are currently securely attached, and to what extent they forgive their spouses following a transgression. Our results indicated that spouses who grew up in higher quality family environments were generally more securely attached and more forgiving in their relationships. In addition, these spouses' attachment security partially mediated between their childhood experiences and their forgiveness behaviors in marriage, suggesting that the family of origin may influence the tendency to forgive in marriage, but part of that influence may be through a spouse's attachment security.