Based on these new findings in social and personality psychology, here are five things you never knew mindfulness could do for you.  

Make you a kinder person

One series of studies from Paul Condon and colleagues at Northeastern University provides some compelling evidence that practicing mindfulness can indeed increase empathy and lead people to act more altruistically.

In a clever experiment, a group of study participants were asked to wait in a waiting room while the researchers were preparing their session, and were confronted by a person on crutches who was grimacing clearly in pain (an actor hired for the purpose of the study). The participant was seated in one of three chairs, all of which were occupied. The occupants of the other two chairs (also actors) did not volunteer their seats for the person in pain, creating a "bystander effect" that could encourage the participant not to help because the other people present weren't helping.

The researchers found that participants who were part of a group that had been practicing meditation for eight weeks (they were under the impression that the study was about the cognitive effects of mindfulness) was significantly more likely to volunteer the seat for the person in pain than the non-meditating control group.

"These findings are the first to show the power of meditation to increase one's compassionate response to others who are in pain," one of the study's lead authors, Dr. Paul Condon, said during the panel.

online might have a similar effect. In a subsequent study, they showed that people who underwent a two-week, 10 minute-a-day meditation course using the smartphone app Headspace 

Learn to forgive

Psychologist Dr. Johan Karremans of Radboud University in the Netherlands presented three studies which suggested that people with more mindful personalities, as well as those who practice meditation, are more likely to forgive others for perceived wrongdoings. One of the studies showed that mindful people tend to more readily forgive their partners for past offenses, and also tend to be more accepting of their partners overall.

Calm your neuroses

Do you have neurotic tendencies? You might give mindfulness a try. The practice has been shown to help quell the voice of the "obnoxious roommate" in your head.

Robinson's research has shown that mindfulness can reduce feelings of anger and depression among people disposed to neuroticism. Other studies by Robinson and colleagues found that while negative feelings tend to lower self-control because they reduce mindfulness, practicing mindfulness can actually increase self-control.

Unravel unconscious racial biases

While most people are not overtly racist, research suggests that nearly all of us may display some level of unconscious racial biases operating below the surface that influence the way we think about behave. Some studies have suggested that meditation acts as an antidote to the mental automaticity -- our tendency to think about, judge and react to things swiftly and largely unconsciously -- that gives rise to these biases.

Mindfulness may reduce automatic responses, or even to the extreme, prevent these responses," psychologist and mindfulness researcher Dr. Brian Ostafin said during the symposium.

Restore your sense of wonder.

A mindfulness practice may actually prime the mind for these types of experiences. A recent University of Groningen study found that subjects who participated in a brief mindfulness exercise reported greater reactions to awe-inspiring images than those who did not complete the mindfulness exercise.

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