Double your enjoyment by capturing the moment

You may want to start photographing your experiences as a recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has found that every click brings you closer to happy times. The research suggested that people who take photos of their experiences usually enjoy the events more than people who don't.

University of Southern California’s Kristin Diehl, Yale University’s Gal Zauberman and University of Pennsylvania’s Alixandra Barasch wrote "To the best of our knowledge, this research is the first extensive investigation examining how taking photos affects people's enjoyment of their experiences." "We show that, relative to not taking photos, photography can heighten enjoyment of positive experiences by increasing engagement," they added.

In the study, Diehl and her colleagues outline a series of nine experiments involving over 2,000 participants in the field and the lab designed to examine the effect of taking photographs of an experience on people's enjoyment of an activity.

While people might think that stopping to take photographs would detract from the whole experience and make it less pleasurable, participants who took photos reported being more engaged in the activity, according to the study.

"One critical factor that has been shown to affect enjoyment is the extent to which people are engaged with the experience," the authors wrote. They found that clicking photographs naturally draws people more into the experience.

While taking photos can increase enjoyment in many circumstances, this effect requires active participation, according to the researchers. Cameras that record any moment of an experience without the individual's active decision of what to capture are unlikely to have the same effect, they said.