Validation and norms of Rye forgiveness scale among Iranian university students Sajjad Rezaei 1 & Maryam Arfa 2 & Khadijeh Rezaei 3 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract The general purpose of the present research is normalization and validation of Rye Forgiveness Scale (RFS) that specifically measures victim’s responses toward an offender. For this purpose, we examined the test-retest reliability of RFS on 50 students with an interval of 3 weeks with a pilot study. Through obtained standard deviation at this stage, the final sample size was estimated in the original study (n = 1080) and students were selected by multistage cluster-random sampling method. RFS test- retest reliability, the forgiveness Presence of Positive (PP), and Absence of Negative (AN) subscales were calculated to be 0.78, 0.73, and 0.75, respectively. In the original study,945 (375 males and 570 females) students with a mean age of 20.56 ± 3.41 took part. Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for RFS as well as PP and AN subscales were estimated as 0.74, 0.71, and 0.75 respectively. RFS Scores (and its subscales) had a direct relationship with the measures of satisfaction and meaning in life, happiness and hope (r ≥ 0.40, p < .001); and in the expected directions predicted a significant proportion of the variance in scores for that measures. Eventually, the norm table was prepared by converting raw scores to z and T standardized scores, followed by calculating the percentile ranks for the whole group. The present research revealed that RFS is a tool with repeatable and reliable results and satisfactory validity coefficients. Keywords Rye forgiveness scale . Validity . Reliability . Normalization . College students Introduction People often tend to react more severely to one who hurts them, the offender. On the other hand, the offender feels that the victim’s reaction would be stronger than his/her action and he/she should retaliate it. Thus, a destructive cycle of Brevenge^ is launched whose origin is perceived injustice on the part of the parties (Snyder et al. 2011). Stopping this defective cycle is so important that various communities have removed the law of compensation and retaliation from the revengers and transferred it to the courts for regulating revenge responses (Snyder et al. 2011). One of the mechanisms disruptive of this defective cycle is forgiveness, which is emphasized by the major monotheistic religions (Imanifar et al. 2012; Farhadian and Emmons 2009). In line with the purpose of this re- search, Rye, et al. (2001, p. 261) conceptualized forgive- ness as Ba response toward an offender that involves letting go of negative affect (e.g., hostility), cognitions (e.g., thoughts of revenge), and behavior (e.g., verbal aggres- sion), and may also involve positive responses toward the offender (e.g., compassion)^. Cross-sectional and correlational studies have shown that the couples with higher level of mental health, forgive each other more often (Zandipour et al. 2011), and higher levels of forgiveness improve life satisfaction, hopefulness, and happi- ness (Zandipur and Yadgari 2008; Zahed babelan et al. 2011; Seyed Joodat and Zarbakhsh 2015; Issazadegan et al. 2012; Maltby et al. 2005) and result in an increased meaning of life (Van Tongeren et al. 2015). Experimental studies have found that forgiveness-oriented interventions improve life satisfac- tion of the elderly (Arshi et al. 2016) and lead to a higher hope among the adolescents (Al-Mabuk et al. 1995). Recent studies in Italian preadolescent students demonstrated that forgive- ness is negatively correlated with avoidance and revenge (Barcaccia et al. 2018a); moreover, students who scored lower * Sajjad Rezaei Rezaei_Psy@hotmail.com 1 Department of Psychology, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, University of Guilan, Rasht, Iran 2 Department of Psychology, Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran 3 Department of Psychology, Rasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Rasht, Iran Current Psychology https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00196-y