When people get nostalgic, they are living in the past. In those moments, the past seems rosy, and
often as more positive than the present.
Nostalgia can be induced by thinking about past events, by going to
places you have experienced before, or even by hearing a song that brings back
memories of things that happened.
Is nostalgia a good thing or a bad thing for people? It clearly seems to make people feel better
in the moment. Any time you focus on a positive memory, you tend to get a boost
of positive feeling. But, are there any
other positive benefits of nostalgia?
This issue was explored in a paper in the November, 2013
issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
by Wing-Yee Cheung, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Erica Hepper, Jamie
Arndt, and Ad Vingerhoets. They
suggested that nostalgia may actually make people more optimistic about the
future.
In one study, the researchers simply had college students
write a short essay about a past event that made them feel nostalgic or a past
event that seemed ordinary. Ratings
suggested that making people write about a nostalgic event made people feel
more nostalgic and also slightly more positive than writing about an ordinary
event. Using a program called the
Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software developed by my colleague
Jamie Pennebaker and his colleagues, the researchers analyzed the words used in
the essays. LIWC counts different kinds
of words that appear in text including words relating to optimism. People writing about nostalgic events
contained more words relating to optimism than people writing about ordinary
events.
In another study, participants instructed to think about a
past event that made them feel nostalgic rated themselves as feeling more
optimistic than those instructed to think about an ordinary event. Optimism increased above and beyond any
influence that thinking about a nostalgic event had on people’s positive
feelings in general.
The remaining studies in this paper examined why nostalgia
makes people feel more optimistic. These
studies used internet surveys in order to have a broader age range of
participants. They induced nostalgia in
some participants by having them listen to songs or read song lyrics that were
associated with nostalgic feelings (for those participants).
As in the other studies, participants who were induced to
feel nostalgic also expressed more optimism of the future. This optimism is related to two other
factors. First, nostalgia makes people
feel more socially connected to others.
This social connection boosts people’s positive feelings about
themselves. That increase in self-esteem
then increases feelings of optimism.
This set of studies suggests that nostalgia can play a
beneficial role in people’s lives. When
times are tough, it may seem as though things may never get better. By focusing on positive times from the past,
though, people may help themselves to be more connected to others, which can
give them the resources to be more optimistic about the future.
A limitation of this study is that these effects were all
statistically reliable, but they were rather small overall. People got more optimistic, but not by a
lot. It remains to be seen how much of a
practical impact nostalgia may have on people’s day-to-day behavior.
