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Forgiveness Interventions to Promote Physical Health

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Forgiveness and Health

Abstract

Forgiveness and unforgiveness have been linked to short-term physiological responses. This information provides the basis to hypothesize, if not conclude, that chronic and continuing unforgiveness may present a risk to human physical health, and/or that forgiveness interventions may have a role to play in reducing these physical experiences. This chapter describes how unforgiveness and forgiveness are experienced physically; summarizes the impact that forgiveness interventions are recognized to have on human physiology and health conditions; proposes a model describing these relationships; and identifies a research agenda to move this scholarship forward. The analysis presented here suggests that future research will be able to document the use of forgiveness therapies to address and heal the consequences of stress-related health experiences. It is exciting to recognize that these interventions can have enormous personal and public health impacts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, University of Minnesota, 1035 University Drive, Duluth, MN, 55812, USA

    Barbara Elliott

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  1. Barbara Elliott
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Correspondence to Barbara Elliott .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Luther College, Decorah, Iowa, USA

    Loren Toussaint

  2. Dept of Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia, USA

    Everett Worthington

  3. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    David R. Williams

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Elliott, B. (2015). Forgiveness Interventions to Promote Physical Health. In: Toussaint, L., Worthington, E., Williams, D. (eds) Forgiveness and Health. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9993-5_18

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