Good experiences are best shared: Study

If you are planning to visit your dream destination all alone, think again! Researchers have found that undergoing an experience with another person seems to intensify that particular experience.

People who share experiences with another person rate those experiences as more pleasant or unpleasant than those who undergo the experience on their own, the findings showed.

"When people are paying attention to the same pleasant thing, whether the Mona Lisa or a song on the radio, our research shows that the experience is much more pleasurable," said Erica Boothby, psychological scientist and lead researcher at the Yale University.

"And the reverse is true of unpleasant experiences - not sharing them makes them more pleasurable, while sharing them makes them worse," Boothby pointed out.

The research suggests that sharing an experience with someone else, even silently, may focus our attention, making us more attuned to what we are sensing and perceiving.

For the study, researchers explored the consequences of sharing experiences that unfold socially but silently.

In once of the experiments involving college students, the researchers found that even when the the chocolate pieces they were offered to taste were identical, the students tended to report the shared chocolate as being more appetising.

The findings suggests that the mere act of sharing may influence how things are actually sensed or perceived by 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," Boothby stressed.

The study appeared in the journal Psychological Science.