An eight-week meditation program led women to experience more empathy toward strangers, suggesting that meditation can improve our ability to understand and experience other people’s feelings.

“When you practice mindfulness meditation, these feelings of connectedness, empathy and compassion arise naturally. It’s almost like a side effect,” he says Fadel Zeidan at the University of California, San Diego. This type of meditation is the practice of focusing attention on the present moment by noticing sensations such as breathing, and is believed to reduce people’s sense of self and help them…