The Role of Gratitude and Forgiveness Toward Self-awareness in Emerging Adulthood

A transition period from adolescence to adulthood is called emerging adulthood. Individuals experience periods of life that offer opportunities to explore identity in various aspects of life, such as love, work, and views of the world. Self-awareness is an important self-development component for emerging adulthood. Self-awareness is the ability to see oneself clearly and objectively. Self-awareness will become more visible when individuals can use character strengths in living their lives. One of the two character strengths that people have is gratitude and forgiveness. Gratitude is the character strength most strongly associated with life satisfaction. Forgiveness is one of the characteristics of the virtue of temperance, namely a virtue that correlates with an individual’s attitude to refrain from anything that is excessive and has the potential to cause undesirable consequences. This research uses a non-experimental quantitative approach using the Indonesian version of the character strength scale developed by the VIA Institute via the viacharacter.org with an internal consistency reliability of 0.75, which the researcher uses for the gratitude and forgiveness sections. The scale for self-awareness uses the Self-Awareness Outcomes Questionnaire (SAOQ) that has 38 items. The research subjects were 138 respondents in the emerging adulthood category (18-25 years). The research results found that gratitude and forgiveness had a significant role in self-awareness by 42%. Significance in a positive direction, the more gratitude and forgiveness increases, the more self-awareness increases. Keywords: emerging adulthood, self-awareness, gratitude, forgiveness