Sharing an Experience Amplifies Our Feelings and Emotions: Study

Sharing unique life experiences with others makes it more enjoyable and intensifies your emotional feelings, finds a study.

Going on adventure trip, witnessing a shooting star and diving deep into the sea all sound interesting and elating for those craving for a change from mundane life.  But, a recent psychological research holds these experiences seem more enjoyable when accompanied by another person or a group. Experts from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, observed the impact of sharing experiences with new social contacts. The first part of the trial involved 23 female college students who accidentally met another group comprising of the research team pretending to be participants in the study. All subjects were instructed to sit together in pairs and indulge in a number of activities like looking at paintings and tasting chocolate simultaneously or separately.

It was noted the team of participants who tasted chocolate together liked each other  more than others teams where one would look at the painting while the other tasted chocolate. In the next part of the experiment, the volunteers were asked to taste a bitter chocolate substitute together or one at a time.

Again, it was found that participants who tasted the bitter chocolate together liked it less than groups where either participant ate the chocolate as the other one glanced at paintings. These findings indicate shared experiences amplify both positive and negative feelings.

"When people think of shared experience, what usually comes to mind is being with close others, such as friends or family, and talking with them. We don't realize the extent to which we are influenced by people around us whom we don't know and aren't even communicating with," said Erica Boothby study author and psychological scientist from the Yale University, reports the Psych Central.

The results suggest how our social surroundings affect us and distractions influence our behavior, tendencies and perceptions about incidents and experiences.

"We text friends while at a party, check our Twitter feed while out to dinner, and play Sudoku while watching TV with family - without meaning to, we are un-sharing experiences with the people around us. A pleasant experience that goes unshared is a missed opportunity to focus on the activity we and others are doing and give it a boost," adds Boothby, reports the Daily Mail.

More information is available online in the journal Psychological Science.