How Forgiveness Changes You and Your Brain
1. Empathy and perspective taking
The first system includes structures and pathways involved in empathy and perspective taking, or sensing the emotions of others and imagining their thoughts and feelings. The region that is central to sensing other people’s emotions, the anterior insula, is tucked in behind the ears and signals visceral activity, which means involuntary bodily responses like a hastened heartbeat or a fluttery stomach sensation. The anterior insula both responds to our own physical experience and also gets activated when we detect other people’s emotional expressions in the face, voice, and even body through a process called biobehavioral synchrony.
