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Perspective Taking Perspective taking describes a person's attempt to understand a stimulus from a different point of view. In relationships, perspective taking typically describes one person's attempt to understand a relationship partner's mental representations—his or her thoughts, feelings, attitudes, beliefs, preferences, or evaluations. Perspective taking is a broad term that is generally used to describe conscious and deliberate attempts to infer other people's mental states. Perspective taking can lead to empathy, whereby a person directly experiences another's emotional state or can induce people to experience emotions about another person's experience, such as pride or sympathy. Although some evidence exists of perspective taking in higher order primates, there appears to be a dramatic and qualitative difference in both the frequency and elaborate content of perspective taking in humans, making it one mental process that appears to truly distinguish humans from other animals. Accurate perspective taking is a critical feature of successful ...