TY - JOUR T1 - THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN TRAIT FORGIVENESS AND MENTAL HEALTH: THE MEDIATING EFFECT OF RUMINATION AU - Li, Wei AU - Yang, Xiaofeng PY - 2019 DA - September DO - 10.18769/ijasos.592297 JF - IJASOS- International E-journal of Advances in Social Sciences JO - IJASOS PB - OCERINT International Organization Center of Academic Research WT - DergiPark SN - 2411-183X SP - 717 EP - 723 VL - 5 IS - 14 LA - en AB - Trait forgiveness is atendency to forgive others across a wide range of interpersonal circumstances. Thoughthere is growing evidence to suggest that failure to forgive is closely relatedto indicators of poor mental health as depression, anxiety and anger, lessattention has been paid to the relationship between trait forgiveness andmental health. In order to study the mechanism of the relationship of thesetwo variables, we introduce rumination as a third variable, which has beenproved to correlate negatively with state forgiveness and positively withmental health problems. We hypothesized that an individual’s mental healthcould be predicted by his/her trait forgiveness and rumination. We tested thishypothesis using a survey, in which five hundred and thirty-seven collegestudents (175 males and 362 females) from five universities in China wereinvestigated with Trait Forgiveness Scale (TFS), Ruminative Response Scale(RRS), Centre for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale (CES-D), Self-RatingAnxiety Scale (SAS) and Trait Anger Scale (TAS). Descriptive statistics andinferential statistics were adopted to analyse the data of survey with SPSS 21.Results indicate that (a) significant gender difference exists in traitforgiveness, that is, trait forgiveness of female students is significantlyhigher than that of male students (t= -2.06, p< 0.05); (b) students inLow Forgiveness Group (the Lower 27%) have higher scores of depression, anxietyand anger than those in High Forgiveness Group (the Upper 27%)(t = -5.86, -6.07 and -7.48,respectively, ps < 0.001);(c) trait forgiveness negatively correlates with rumination (r = -0.21, p< 0.001), depression (r= -0.30, p< 0.001), anxiety (r = -0.31, p< 0.001) and anger (r= -0.34, p< 0.001), whilerumination positively correlates with depression (r = 0.61, p< 0.001),anxiety (r = 0.55, p< 0.001) and anger (r = 0.36, p< 0.001); (d) among the predictive variables, trait forgivenessis the best one, which accounts for 8.7%,9.5% and 11.6%of the variation in depression, anxiety and anger; (e) rumination serves as apartial mediator variable between trait forgiveness and mental health. 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