Transgressive Motivation Test

For people trying to understand what happens after a hurtful act, the Transgressive Motivation Test offers a focused look at retaliatory wishes, mistrust, and withdrawal from the person involved. As a transgressive motivation questionnaire, it suits someone examining a specific offense and wanting a clearer picture of their current response. The result organizes these reactions into a profile that can make resentment, distance, and forgiveness easier to reflect on.

What This Assessment Explores

It examines reactions to a perceived offense when anger, mistrust, resentment, or unresolved hurt remains active. Items cover revenge wishes, expectations that the offender should suffer, avoidance, broken contact, and difficulty feeling positively toward that person. The questions describe situations; the scales read the broader motivational tendencies expressed across them.

The following groups explain the profile:

• Vindictiveness (5-25) measures vengeful motivation; Low 5-11, Moderate 12-13, and High 14-25 show increasing revenge-seeking and difficulty forgiving.
• Desire to Avoid the Offender (7-35) measures distancing after harm; Low avoidance 7-17, Moderate avoidance 18-22, and High avoidance 23-35 show increasing desire to avoid contact.

The items also present resentment, distrust, and difficulty with forgiveness as context, not separate displayed scales.

The two results distinguish stronger revenge-oriented motivation from a stronger desire to avoid the offender; both tendencies may coexist after one event.

Methodology and Evidence Base

This self-report questionnaire uses five-point agreement responses, from strong disagreement to strong agreement. Neutral or indifferent wording varies, but each item places the reaction along the same continuum. The questionnaire reports results on two displayed scales and assigns the shown bands.

Methodologically, the structure is conceptually consistent with the TRIM-12 described by McCullough and colleagues in 1998, a measure distinguishing revenge and avoidance motivations after interpersonal transgressions. A related 2002 study by McCullough and Hoyt provides a framework for viewing these dispositions as personality-linked tendencies rather than isolated actions. The online questionnaire uses the same conceptual distinction but is not the published instrument itself.

When interpreting the avoidance scale, a higher avoidance result points to stronger distancing, while a higher score on the revenge-oriented dimension points to stronger retaliatory motivation. Its bands are the categories displayed for this questionnaire and describe the direction and degree of each result. Responses may reflect current conflict, memory, mood, self-awareness, and willingness to disclose, so one score cannot capture the full relationship context.