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Being securely attached and willing to forgive your partner tends to promote greater relationship success. Though attachment and partner forgiveness are associated cross-sectionally, research has yet to investigate whether and how these positive relationship factors tend to codevelop over time. The current study examined cross-lagged effects and correlated changes in partner forgivingness and attachment across a 2-year period with two measurement occasions ( n = 514 individuals). Additionally, dyadic analyses were conducted with a subsample of dyads in the study ( n = 149 dyads). Individual level analyses evidenced negative cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between attachment-anxiety and forgivingness. Attachment-avoidance and forgivingness showed significant correlated changes over time. Dyadic level analyses showed that attachment-avoidance predicted partner forgivingness 2 years later but not vice versa. Findings suggest that longitudinal associations between attachment and forgivingness may take different forms at the individual and dyadic level.

Social well-being reflects the perception of one’s social functioning, which plays an important role in physical and psychological health. However, the exact neuroanatomical substrate for social well-being remains unclear. To address the issue, we employed the voxel-based morphometry method to probe the neuroanatomical basis of individual variation in social well-being in young healthy adults (n = 136). The results revealed a significant negative association between social well-being and regional gray matter density (rGMD) in an anatomical cluster that mainly includes the left orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) that has been involved in emotion regulation and social cognition. Furthermore, a balanced 4-fold cross-validation using the machine learning approach revealed that rGMD in the left OFC could be reliably related to social well-being. More importantly, the multiple mediation analysis revealed that neuroticism and dispositional forgiveness independently mediated the association between rGMD in the left OFC and social well-being. In addition, all these results remained stable when subjective socioeconomic status was controlled. Together, our results provide the initial evidence that the OFC is a neuroanatomical substrate for social well-being and demonstrate that the OFC is a crucial neural site linking neuroticism and dispositional forgiveness to social well-being.

Given the scarcity of instruments in Spanish to measure forgiveness, two studies were conducted in this population to obtain validity evidence of the Heartland Forgiveness Scale (HFS), an instrument that measures dispositional forgiveness of self, others, and situations. In the first study, 203 students (65% women) participated. After ensuring the linguistic adequacy and clarity of the wording of the items, a lack of congruence was found between the factors obtained in the exploratory factor analysis and the original theoretical structure of the HFS. A sample of 512 participants (63.9% women) attended the second study. This study aimed to analyze the construct validity of the HFS using confirmatory factor analysis through structural equation modelling and to explore convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity. Of the different factorial configurations tested (including the original), only a scale reduction to eight items, grouped into three factors, showed an appropriate fit. The HFS eight-item version also showed acceptable internal consistency, adequate convergent and discriminant validity, and criterion validity with respect to related variables. These findings suggest that the eight-item version of the HFS may be a valid and reliable tool for assessing forgiveness for self, others, and situations in Spanish adults. post-print 927 KB