How forgiveness changes you and your brain

As the science director at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, Emiliana Simon-Thomas thinks a lot about how prosocial emotions and behaviors — like compassion and gratitude — influence our well-being and society as a whole. And recently, she’s been more deeply exploring the effects of forgiveness. 

“Forgiveness is an idea that most people endorse, that most people feel is a virtue or the right thing to do, but can often be more challenging than we expect in actual day-to-day life,” Simon-Thomas said during a Berkeley event in July. 

Not only is it difficult to put into practice, she says, but it’s also hard to define — it’s often understood differently from person to person and culture to culture. 

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Simon-Thomas is joined in a conversation by child clinical psychologist Allison Briscoe-Smith, a senior fellow at the center, and clinical neuropsychologist Melike Fourie of the Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Together, they explore what forgiveness is, how it works in the body and brain and the ways people can practice forgiveness that feel safe and empowering. 

This event took place on July 30, 2025, and was part of a Greater Good Science Center project on forgiveness supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Learn more on the foundation’s Discover Forgiveness website.

Watch a video of the conversation on the Greater Good Science Center YouTube page.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcast/berkeley-talks).

Music by HoliznaCC0.

Photo by Milad Fakurian via Unsplash.

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