The joys of nostalgia

I have always been prone to nostalgia, even when you would have thought I was too young for it. It’s easy to regard this tendency as a character weakness; nostalgia gets bad press sometimes, being perceived as a sentimental waste of time, and it’s long been described as a psychological malady. However, a new paper surveys some recent research on the subject and recasts nostalgia as a psychological strength, a trick whereby we give our meat something to think about that makes us feel happier, more connected to others, and better about ourselves. This press release gives a brief overview, and the paper itself is, of course, much more interesting, if you can get your hands on it (Nostalgia: Past, Present, and Future, by Constantine Sedikides, Tim Wildschut, Jamie Arndt, and Clay Routledge. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(5): 304–307)

One of the intriguing things I found in the paper is a comparison of people’s emotional reactions to recalling different kinds of experiences: positive, ordinary, nostalgic. Nostalgic experiences were unique in calling up both negative and positive emotions, but their net effect was likely to be a happy one. One study indicated that in nostalgic memories, even uncomfortable or unhappy events were often viewed side by side with happier ones, and this combination of the bitter and the sweet was perceived in terms of a redemption narrative that allowed loss or upset to be transmuted into something better.

It’s this ability to see the ebb and flow of experience as part of a bigger picture that may contribute to one of the benefits of nostalgia: a kinder view of one’s own self. The article itself quotes from another source to describe something that rang quite true for me:

Nostalgia has been theorized to bestow “an endearing luster” on the self and to cast “marginal, fugitive, and eccentric facets of earlier selves in a positive light”.

(The quotes are from Davis, F. (1979). Yearning for yesterday: A sociology of nostalgia. New York: Free Press, pp. 41–46.)

To return again to the emotion and music theme, this reminded me of how I feel sometimes when listening to music that I’ve known for a long time, particularly the music of the Moody Blues, which means a great deal to me and has accompanied me through many of the events of my life since my early 20s. Somehow looking back at the memories evoked by the music (memories of times both good and bad, and certainly encompassing some eccentric facets of my earlier selves) blends the many aspects of my past into a story that, for all its dark spots, looks lovable to me (rather than filling me with angst over the mistakes I’ve made and the things I’ve lost).

The paper also mentions a couple of other benefits of nostalgia: the alleviation of loneliness (by letting us relive memories of beloved people and recall our bonds with them) and the existential dread of knowing that we must die someday (by supplying a shared sense of meaning). All in all, a very nice rehabilitation of a phenomenon once seen as an illness!

The paper closes with some thoughts on areas that might merit further exploration, in particular the possibly changing role of nostalgia over the lifespan, and the ways nostalgia might provide a thread linking past and present selves and thus contribute to our sense of identity.