Nostalgia: A Psychological Resource
Nostalgia is a topic that most lay people are familiar with, but, until recently, few social scientists understood. Once viewed as a disease, nostalgia is now considered to be an important psychological resource. It involves revisiting personally cherished memories that involve close others. When people engage in nostalgia, they experience a boost in positive psychological states such as positive mood, feelings of social connectedness, self-esteem, self-continuity, and perceptions of meaning in life. Since nostalgia promotes these positive states, when people experience negative states (such as loneliness or meaninglessness), they use nostalgia to regulate distress.
Nostalgia: A Psychological Resource
This book explains in detail what nostalgia is, how views of it have changed over time, and how it has been studied by social scientists. It explores issues like how common nostalgia is and whether people differ in their tendency to be nostalgic. It looks at the triggers and inspiration for nostalgia, and the emotional states that are associated with it. Finally, the psychological, social, and behavioral effects of engaging in nostalgia are discussed.
"There is a dearth of psychological research in the area of nostalgia, and what Clay Routledge achieves with this book is to fill it... Different from a typical scholarly article, which feels cold and lackluster, Routledge's writing is entertaining, is lighthearted, and resembles a conversation between him and the reader. At its core, his book is truly an aggregate of research studies conducted around the world with a diverse sample of populations. One of the strengths of the book is that his writing eases the reader to logically think of the next research question, and the reader is surprised (or perhaps purposefully primed) to discover that Routledge had similar thoughts and answered the reader's questions, leaving the reader partly satisfed. Another carefully crafted writing technique and strength of the book is how he ends each chapter with a hint of the next chapter's topic, again leaving the reader wanting more... Routledge appears to be mindful of the hurried life of most professionals and strives to make Nostalgia a quick and easy read." - Guiliana McQuirt, Florida State University College of Medicine, PsycCritiques
"Routledge (North Dakota State Univ.) presents a broad sumary of all current research on nostalgia... After briefly summarizing changes in understanding of nostalgia through the ages, Routledge systematically details typical experiences of nostalgia; antecendents, connections, and consequences of nostalgia; and details regarding individual differences in nostalgia... The breadth of information presented is impresive, and the author includes data from both non-experimental and experiemntal investigations... The reader comes away with a deep understanding of all current knowledge in this area of psychological research... Summing Up: Recommended. All readers." -C. J. Jones, California State University, Fresno, Choice
Nostalgia is a topic that most lay people are familiar with, but, until recently, few social scientists understood. Once viewed as a disease, nostalgia is now considered to be an important psychological resource. It involves revisiting personally cherished memories that involve close others. When people engage in nostalgia, they experience a boost in positive psychological states such as positive mood, feelings of social connectedness, self-esteem, self-continuity, and perceptions of meaning in life. Since nostalgia promotes these positive states, when people experience negative states (such as loneliness or meaninglessness), they use nostalgia to regulate distress.
This book explains in detail what nostalgia is, how views of it have changed over time, and how it has been studied by social scientists. It explores issues like how common nostalgia is and whether people differ in their tendency to be nostalgic. It looks at the triggers and inspiration for nostalgia, and the emotional states that are associated with it. Finally, the psychological, social, and behavioral effects of engaging in nostalgia are discussed.
The concept of nostalgia underwent a renaissance in the early 1900s, however, as the symptoms were found to align with better-studied psychological illnesses such as shell shock (what doctors now call post-traumatic stress disorder), anxiety, or schizophrenia. Over time, the word evolved into its current meaning: a fondness for objects or experiences of the past, with or without debilitating pangs of sadness.
Nostalgia is a mostly positive emotional experience that involves reminiscing about personally significant events and/or social relationships. A growing literature indicates that nostalgic reflection generally promotes well-being. This chapter focuses on how nostalgia promotes well-being by functioning as a resource for meaning in life. First, we discuss research demonstrating that nostalgic memories are meaningful memories and that reflecting on nostalgic memories bolsters a sense of meaning in life. Moreover, we review evidence that nostalgia is a psychological resource that people turn to when experiencing meaning deficits. Further, nostalgia functions to buffer existential threats and mitigate the negative consequences of lack of meaning. Finally, we discuss research suggesting that nostalgia encourages the pursuit of the good life by energizing meaning-making efforts of authenticity, self-growth, and interpersonal connection.
There has been a slow evolution, spanning the course of the last three centuries, in how nostalgia is understood. While widely seen as an illness between the 17th and 19th centuries, more recently it has evolved into a more esteemed mental process. Numerous contemporary studies support the idea that nostalgia is a powerful inner resource that not only can propel us toward social connectedness, self-continuity, and spiritual wellness, but might prove to be a trustworthy ally in prompting us toward the construction of a renewed self and society (Routledge, Sedikides, Wildschut & Juhl, 2013).
X. Zhou et al. The restorative power of nostalgia: Thwarting loneliness by raising happiness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social, Psychological and Personality Science.Posted online September 8, 2021. doi: 10.1177/19485506211041830.
A. Abeyta, C. Routledge and J. Juhl. Looking back to move forward: Nostalgia as a psychological resource for promoting relationship goals and overcoming relationship challenges. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 109, December 2015, p. 1029. doi: 10.1037/pspi0000036.
Such trends are concerning, but better understanding them will help us solve the problems that technological and societal changes can create or exacerbate, which ultimately advances progress. Recognizing unintended consequences, admitting and striving to fix mistakes, and moving forward with hope in the face of fear, uncertainty, and tragedy are critical psychological components of progress.
So when you induce sadness in the laboratory or you induce negative affect in the laboratory you find that people subsequently feel more nostalgic. When you induce a feeling of social exclusion, or ostracism, or loneliness in a laboratory you find that people subsequently feel more nostalgic. When you induce some sense of meaningless, or provoke people to question the meaningfulness of their life, they subsequently respond with a heightened sense of nostalgia. So the second class of triggers seems to be these negative psychological states that people are turning to nostalgia to as a way to regulate negative emotions and experiences.
Kaitlin Luna: Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology , a biweekly podcast from the American Psychological Association that explores the connections between psychological science and everyday life. I'm your host, Kaitlin Luna.
Nostalgia, that longing feeling for the past when things seemed better, easier, and more fun. It's the feeling behind countless number one hits. It's what's resurrecting old TV shows and being capitalized on by politicians. We all know the feeling. Some of us maybe a little too well. What psychological purpose does nostalgia serve? Is it good or bad? Are we more nostalgic today in our hectic connected world? Is there such a thing as the good old days? Here to help explain is Dr. Krystine Batcho, professor of psychology at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York. She's an expert on nostalgia and develops the nostalgia inventory, a survey that assesses proneness to personal nostalgia. Welcome, Dr. Batcho.
That gives us a sense of who we want to be down the road in the future. The other way that nostalgia serves an essential psychological function is that it is a highly social emotion. It connects us to other people. It does that and so many beautiful ways. In the beginning, when we're very young, it's part of what bonds us to the most important people in our life, our parents, our siblings, our friends. As we go through life, it can broaden out and extend to a wider sphere of the people we interact with. It's a social connectedness phenomenon and nostalgia is in that sense a very healthy pro-social emotion.
One is an individual's personality or their psychological well-being in the first place. If you have two individuals one of whom is really happy in their current life and they're emotionally doing just fine. They might go back and remember bad things and then laugh about them and say wow we've come a long way since those days haven't, we. Now we have a big Thanksgiving feast and we have all this food. I remember being six years old not having enough to eat. Whereas someone else who is suffering from something like depression or an anxiety disorder. They might go back and think about the past and then let that further sadden them rather than make them happy by comparison with how far they've come.
Batcho: Yes, it is. I think it's of great importance today because some of the current survey data have suggested that especially for the millennial generation and other adults, there is a great deal of reported loneliness. Some people suspect that has a little bit to do, not entirely but a little bit to do with the Internet or cyberspace and social media. The argument is there are 24 hours in a day. How do you spend those hours? People who grew up before the Internet their days were spent largely either alone or with other people face to face. That's no longer the case. We have an incredible amount of time spent in cyberspace. Even when you're connecting to other people in a social way, you're connecting to them at a distance. I believe that the psychological distancing can make people feel lonelier than they would have felt had they spent exactly the same amount of time having a cup of coffee with that person face to face. I think that the social element needs to be explored and researched even more heavily given the great proportion of time that young adults are spending, not in actual face to face, but in virtual reality. 041b061a72