Sharing experiences with others makes them more INTENSE: Carrying out tasks in a group amplifies how they make you feel

Students who shared chocolate with another person said it eople who share experiences with others rate them as more pleasant or unpleasant than those who undergo the same experience on their own This is also the case when carried out with friends or people you've just met Sharing experiences with others makes them more intense, whether they are good or bad, experts claim. And shared experiences are intensified even if they happen in silence, or with someone who an individual has only just met Psychological scientist Erica Boothby, of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, said: ‘We often think that what matters in social life is being together with others, but we’ve found it also really matters what those people are doing. The researchers suggest that sharing an experience with someone else, even silently, such as looking at art in a gallery makes us more attuned to what we are sensing and perceiving Students reported liking the chocolate they had tasted at the same time as the other participant more than the chocolate they had tasted while the other participant was looking at the book. To find out whether sharing makes any experience more pleasant or unpleasant, the researchers tasked another group of students to taste a bitter ‘chocolate substitute,’ which was really a square of 90 per cent dark chocolate deemed to taste unpleasant.