Nostalgia fulfills pivotal functions for individuals, but lacks an empirically-derived and comprehensive definition. We examined lay conceptions of nostalgia using a prototype approach. In Study 1, participants generated open-ended features of nostalgia, which were coded into categories. In Study 2, participants rated the centrality of these categories, which were subsequently classified as central (e.g., memories, relationships, happiness) or peripheral (e.g., daydreaming, regret, loneliness). Central (compared to peripheral) features were more often recalled and falsely recognized (Study 3), were classified more quickly (Study 4), were judged to reflect more nostalgia in a vignette (Study 5), better characterized participants' own nostalgic (vs. ordinary) experiences (Study 6), and prompted higher levels of actual nostalgia and its intrapersonal benefits when used to trigger a personal memory, regardless of age (Study 7). These findings highlight that lay people view nostalgia as a selfrelevant and social blended emotional and cognitive state, featuring a mixture of happiness and loss. The findings also aid understanding of nostalgia's functions and identify new methods for future research.Keywords: nostalgia, prototype, emotions, memory, self Nostalgia 3 Nostalgia is part of the fabric of everyday life. After centuries of scientific neglect, the construct has recently been the focus of burgeoning empirical and theoretical developments. According to Boym (2001), nostalgia is experienced by almost everyone.Indeed, 79% of undergraduates report experiencing nostalgia at least once a week (Wildschut, Sedikides, Arndt, & Routledge, 2006), as do over half of adults in every five-year age cohort from age 18 to 90 (Hepper, Wildschut, Sedikides, Routledge, & Arndt, 2011). Moreover, recent research suggests that nostalgia serves vital psychological functions .Despite emerging evidence for the functional relevance of nostalgia, the mechanisms by which it operates are poorly understood. A major reason for this is that there exists no coherent definition of nostalgia; in fact, its nature has long been the subject of debate. The purpose of the present research is to resolve this debate by uncovering conclusively what "nostalgia" means to people. In particular, we propose that lay persons' views of nostalgia have a prototype structure characterized by a core set of central features. In examining this proposal, we aim to clarify what contemporary scholars have been studying and to provide new directions and methods for studying nostalgia further. Historical Conceptions of NostalgiaThe term "nostalgia" derives from the Greek words nostos, meaning return to one's native land, and algos, meaning pain or suffering: literally, suffering caused by longing to return home. However, the idea existed long before the word. In probably its first exploration in classical literature, the theme of nostalgia runs strongly through Homer's Odyssey, in which the hero Odysseus nurtures memories of Ithaca and his family throughout his lon...

Nostalgia is a self-conscious, bittersweet but predominantly positive and fundamentally social emotion. It arises from fond memories mixed with yearning about one's childhood, close relationships, or atypically positive events, and it entails a redemption trajectory. It is triggered by a variety of external stimuli or internal states, is prevalent, is universal, and is experienced across ages. Nostalgia serves a self-oriented function (by raising self-positivity and facilitating perceptions of a positive future), an existential function (by increasing perceptions of life as meaningful), and a sociality function (by increasing social connectedness, reinforcing sociallyoriented action tendencies, and promoting prosocial behavior). These functions are independent of the positive affect that nostalgia may incite. Also, nostalgia-elicited sociality often mediates the self-positivity and existential functions. In addition, nostalgia maintains psychological and physiological homeostasis along the following regulatory cycle: (i) Noxious stimuli, as general as avoidance motivation and as specific as self-threat (negative performance feedback), existential threat (meaninglessness, mortality awareness), social threat (loneliness, social exclusion), well-being threat (stress, boredom), or, perhaps surprisingly, physical coldness intensify felt nostalgia; (ii) In turn, nostalgia (measured or manipulated) alleviates the impact of threat by curtailing the influence of avoidance motivation on approach motivation, buttressing the self from threat, limiting defensive responding to meaninglessness, assuaging existential anxiety, repairing interpersonal isolation, diminishing the blow of stress, relieving boredom through meaning re-establishment, or producing the sensation of physical warmth. Nostalgia has a checkered history, but is now rehabilitated as an adaptive psychological resource.

Self-report studies often call for assessment of socially desirable responding. Many researchers use the Marlowe-Crowne Scale for its brief versions; however, this scale is outdated, and contemporary models of social desirability emphasize its multi-dimensional nature. The 40-item Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR) incorporates Self-Deceptive Enhancement (honest but overly positive responding) and Impression Management (bias toward pleasing others). However, its length limits its practicality. This article introduces the BIDR-16. In four studies, we shorten the BIDR from 40 items to 16 items, while retaining its two-factor structure, reliability, and validity. This short form will be invaluable to researchers wanting to assess social desirability when time is limited.

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Nostalgia is a frequently-experienced complex emotion, understood by laypersons in the United Kingdom and United States of America to (1) refer prototypically to fond, selfrelevant, social memories and (2) be more pleasant (e.g., happy, warm) than unpleasant (e.g., sad, regretful). This research examined whether people across cultures conceive of nostalgia in the same way. Students in 18 countries across 5 continents (N = 1704) rated the prototypicality of 35 features of nostalgia. The samples showed high levels of agreement on the rank-order of features. In all countries, participants rated previously-identified central (vs. peripheral) features as more prototypical of nostalgia, and showed greater inter-individual agreement regarding central (vs. peripheral) features. Cluster analyses revealed subtle variation among groups of countries with respect to the strength of these pancultural patterns.All except African countries manifested the same factor structure of nostalgia features. In Japan, a woman drives past her childhood school and exclaims how natsukashii it is. In Ethiopia, a musician sings a Tizita ballad reliving memories of a lost lover. In the USA, a man smiles nostalgically as he listens to an old record that reminds him of his carefree teenage years. And in ancient Greece, the mythical hero Odysseus is galvanized by memories of his family as he struggles to make his way home from war (Homer, trans. 1921). To what extent are these four characters experiencing the same emotion? Is nostalgia universal?Growing evidence indicates that nostalgia is a self-relevant emotion associated with fond memories (Hepper, Ritchie, Sedikides, & Wildschut, 2012; and that it serves psychological functions (Routledge, Wildschut, Sedikides, & Juhl, 2013;. If nostalgia qualifies as an emotion and an adaptive psychological resource, it may be pancultural. The present article begins to address this issue by examining the equivalence of prototypical conceptions of nostalgia across a range of cultures. The Universality of EmotionThe universality of emotion concepts has long attracted scholarly attention. Darwin (1872/1965) proposed that emotions evolved as adaptive responses to social living, and thus some emotions should be universal. In contrast, Harré (1986) argued that emotions are primarily cultural constructions and thus should vary according to the meanings and practices of different cultural settings. Although the issues are textured, two major lines of research have supported the universality view. The first line of research has identified universally recognized facial expressions, focusing on a core set of "basic" emotions (e.g., anger, joy, sadness; Ekman, 1992;Ekman & Friesen, 1971;Russell, 1991a). The second line of research has examined conceptions of emotion words (Fontaine, Scherer, Roesch, & Ellsworth, 2007; Kuppens, Ceulemans, Timmerman, Diener, & Kim-Prieto, 2006; Páez & Vegara, 1995). This lexical literature has established that, across cultures, emotion (and specific emotions) is a fuzzy c...

Research has identified a large number of strategies that people use to self-enhance or self-protect. We aimed for an empirical integration of these strategies. Two studies used self-report items to assess all commonly recognized self-enhancement or self-protection strategies. In Study 1 (N=345), exploratory factor analysis identified 4 reliable factors. In Study 2 (N=416), this model was validated using confirmatory factor analysis. The factors related differentially to the key personality variables of regulatory focus, self-esteem, and narcissism. Expanding this integrative approach in the future can reveal a great deal about the structure and dynamics of self-enhancement and self-protection motivation.

This research examined the proposition that nostalgia is not simply a past-oriented emotion, but its scope extends into the future, and, in particular, a positive future. We adopted a convergent validation approach, using multiple methods to assess the relation between nostalgia and optimism. Study 1 tested whether nostalgic narratives entail traces of optimism; indeed, nostalgic (compared to ordinary) narratives contained more expressions of optimism.Study 2 manipulated nostalgia through the recollection of nostalgic (vs. ordinary) events, and showed that nostalgia boosts optimism. Study 3 demonstrated that the effect of nostalgia (induced with nomothetically-relevant songs) on optimism is mediated by self-esteem.Finally, Study 4 established that nostalgia (induced with idiographically-relevant lyrics) fosters social connectedness, which subsequently increases self-esteem, which then boosts optimism. The nostalgic experience is inherently optimistic and paints a subjectively rosier future.Keywords: nostalgia, optimism, emotion, memory, self-esteem, social connectedness Nostalgia and Optimism 3 Back to the Future: Nostalgia Increases OptimismThe capacity for mental time travel is considered uniquely human (Sedikides & Skowronski, 1997;Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007). Recollection of the past, consideration of the present, and projection onto the future are interdependent cognitive processes with a shared neurological substrate (Johnson & Sherman, 1990;Klein, Robertson, & Delton, 2010).Hence, if the present self derives positivity from one's past, as research shows is typically the case in nostalgic reverie (Hepper, Ritchie, Sedikides, & Wildschut, 2012;, this positivity could stretch out in time and produce a brighter outlook on the future. Stated otherwise, when individuals become nostalgic, they may accordingly feel optimistic about their future. We test this proposition while also examining mechanisms through which nostalgia may elicit optimism. Historical and Contemporary Conceptions of NostalgiaNostalgia has historically been conceptualized as pathological maladaptation to the present reality and as trepidation of the future Sedikides, Wildschut, & Baden, 2004). In the 17 th century, physician Johannes Hofer (1688/1934) coined the term nostalgia to describe physical and psychological symptoms among Swiss mercenaries fighting away from home and for assorted European monarchs. Since then, nostalgia has been labeled a neurological disease (Scheuchzer, 1731) and a psychological disorder (e.g., repressive compulsion, psychosis; Sterba, 1940). The consensus was that nostalgic individuals are preoccupied with bygone events or objects, such that "their longing for the past matches their dislike of the present and their dread of the future" (Castelnuovo-Tedesco, 1980, p.121). In nostalgia, "the past is lost. The future can never be realized. All is empty. All is lost." (Kleiner, 1977, p.472).Nostalgia, then, was long considered a doomed state of mind: an escapist reaction to the demands of the present and an...

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for one's past, is an emotion that arises from self-relevant and social memories. Nostalgia functions, in part, to foster self-continuity, that is, a sense of connection between one's past and one's present. This article examined, in 6 experiments, how nostalgia fosters self-continuity and the implications of that process for well-being. Nostalgia fosters self-continuity by augmenting social connectedness, that is, a sense of belongingness and acceptance (Experiments 1-4). Nostalgia-induced self-continuity, in turn, confers eudaimonic well-being, operationalized as subjective vitality (i.e., a feeling of aliveness and energy; Experiments 5-6). The findings clarify and expand the benefits of nostalgia for both the self-system and psychological adjustment. (PsycINFO Database Record