Heartfelt Forgiveness

Participants in a study were asked to think of someone who they felt had offended or hurt them. Then they were asked to imagine unforgiving reactions (such as rehearsing the hurt and harboring a grudge) and forgiving reactions (such as feeling empathy or forgiving the person). As you can see from the orange bars, people’s heart rates increased much more sharply from baseline when their thoughts were unforgiving (in the hurt and grudge conditions). The blue bars indicate the heart rates also took longer to return to normal in the unforgiving conditions (Witvliet et al., 2001).