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...

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Graft copolymers of poly(2-vinylpyridine), P2VP, grafted to a backbone of poly(N-isopropyl acrylamide), PNIPAM, are investigated concerning their thermosensitive behavior in aqueous solution. 1H NMR monitors the coil-to-globule transition by quantifying the fraction of mobile segments in the liquid state. Field gradient NMR diffusion studies reveal a decrease of the hydrodynamic radius with temperature as the lower critical solution temperature (LCST) is approached. The LCST and the width of the transition of PNIPAM are increasing with grafting density and decreasing upon salt addition, which is attributed to electrostatic forces. The grafted segments become partially immobilized only for low grafting density. For high grafting density a fraction of the backbone segments remains mobile even above the LCST. 2H spin relaxation rates of the hydration water indicate the presence of water molecules with very slow dynamics in the transition regime, whereas above and below the transition only fast water dynamics is found.