Time magazine highlights Luther College professor's studies on forgiveness

Loren Toussaint

Luther College psychology professor Loren Toussaint is getting more publicity about his research into the role of forgiveness in society.

Time magazine interviewed Toussaint Thursday for an article about the health effects of forgiveness: http://time.com/4370463/forgiveness-stress-health/

The interview comes following the publication in the Journal of Health Psychology of a new study done by Toussaint, 2015 Luther graduate Gabe Dorn, UCLA's George Slavich and UC-Davis' Grant Shields. 

Says Time, "Researchers looked at the effects of lifetime stress on a person's mental health, and how more forgiving people fared compared to people who weren't so forgiving. To do this, they asked 148 young adults to fill out questionnaires that assessed their levels of lifetime stress, their tendency to forgive and their mental and physical health.

No surprise, people with greater exposure to stress over their lifetimes had worse mental and physical health. But the researchers also discovered that if people were highly forgiving of both themselves and others, that characteristic alone virtually eliminated the connection between stress and mental illness."