magazine issue 8 2014 / Issue 22

Revisiting the past can make the present a better place: The psychological and social benefits of nostalgia

• written by Clay Routledge
• edited by Dylan Selterman

Putting Nostalgia to the Test

The problem with historical considerations of nostalgia is that they lacked scientific rigor. For example, in the past, clinicians might have observed that a patient who expressed a longing for some aspect of their past also experienced distress.  Based on this, they may have concluded that the longing for the past was nostalgia and distress was the consequence of this longing. However, a major drawback with this type of correlation-based observation is that the direction of the relationship is entirely unclear. How does one know that nostalgia is the problem, the source of distress? Another possibility is that distress precedes nostalgia. Maybe people turn to nostalgia as a means to counter or cope with negative life experiences and unpleasant emotions. If this were the case, nostalgia would not be a cause of distress but instead a means of treating it. Another problem is that scholars and practitioners of past likely failed to distinguish nostalgia from emotions such as homesickness. A more scientifically sophisticated approach to the study of nostalgia was needed. But it would be some decades before nostalgia would receive serious scientific scrutiny.

In the latter part of the 20^th century marketing researchers and consumer psychologists began to study nostalgia in the context of consumer behavior. Researchers observed, for example, that people have an affinity for products that originated during their youth (e.g., Holbrook, 1993). People tend to like the cars, music, and movies that were produced and sold during their teenage years. As previously mentioned, nostalgia is a powerful economic force. People desire opportunities to revisit the past and all sorts of consumer products facilitate this mental time travel. These marketing studies were, however, more focused on nostalgia’s relation to consumption than on its psychological effects. The question remained: What are the psychological consequences of nostalgia?

With the goal of answering this and related questions, about ten years ago, social psychologists began to systematically study the psychology nostalgia (see Routledge, Wildschut, Sedikides, & Juhl, 2013). The first task was to detail the experience of nostalgia. When people engage in nostalgia, what are they thinking about? What emotions are present in nostalgic memories? To answer these questions, Wildschut and colleagues (2006) content-analyzed people’s written accounts of nostalgic memories. Results from this work indicate that nostalgic memories are good memories. These memories tend to be focused on personally cherished life experiences shared with close others (e.g., family functions, vacations, holidays, weddings, graduations). Further, nostalgic memories contain more positive than negative emotional references. When negative feelings are present in these memories, they tend give way to an emotionally positive conclusion. For example, a person’s nostalgia may involve sadness about missing friends from college she no longer gets to spend time with but will likely also include feelings of gratitude for the time shared with these individuals and maybe even a sense of hope that she will one day see them again.