Holding on to pieces of the past: Daily reports of nostalgia in a life-span sample.

Abstract

Nostalgia, the fond remembrance of one’s past, is a common experience hypothesized to increase across the life span. Yet data on the specific features of nostalgia, such as daily frequency and associated affect, are scarce. This study sought to address this limitation by assessing the daily experience of nostalgia using experience-sampling methods. A life-span sample of 108 participants (47 young, 31 middle-aged, and 30 older adults) completed a 2-week, twice-daily experience-sampling study that yielded data describing the frequency and emotions of everyday nostalgia. Multilevel logistic regression analyses supported increased nostalgia frequency at every life stage: Young adults were 60% less likely to report nostalgia compared with middle-aged adults (odds ratio [OR] = .40), whereas older adults were 3 times more likely than middle-aged adults to report nostalgia (OR = 3.05). Additionally, the experience of nostalgia was associated with significant heterogeneity in positive and negative affect. Approximately 72% of participants experienced an increase in positive affect, and 51% experienced an increase in negative affect. For young and middle-aged adults, a change in positive affect was associated with a 2-times-larger increase in nostalgia likelihood, whereas a change in negative affect was more strongly associated with a nostalgia experience in older adults. The current study provides increased evidence for the affectively mixed nature of nostalgia and how the affective pattern differs for adults of different ages. Greater nostalgia frequency may be instrumental during life review when individuals make meaning of their lives, fulfilling developmental goals of late adulthood.

Variation in bittersweet nostalgic feelings and their divergent effects on daily well-being.

“…Future research with diverse samples could help generalize our findings more broadly or point to important moderators of the effects. For example, older adults report greater levels of nostalgia (Turner & Stanley, 2021; cf. Newman, 2022) and mixed emotions more broadly (Carstensen et al, 2000; Schneider & Stone, 2015).…”

Nostalgia across cultures

“…Also in a British sample, the affectively imbued nostalgia narratives typically follow a redemptive trajectory, in which the negatively toned part is overcome by the positively toned part (i.e., the narrative starts badly but ends well; Wildschut et al, 2006). Further, in an experience sampling study conducted in the USA, 72% of nostalgic participants showed increases in positive affect but only 51% showed increases in negative affect, with older participants manifesting larger affective discrepancy compared to younger ones (Turner & Stanley, 2021). Lastly, a large number of experiments, mostly involving American and British participants, demonstrated that nostalgizing (vs. control) increases positive, but not negative, affect (Sedikides, Wildschut, Routledge, Arndt, Hepper, Zhou, 2015; Sedikides et al, 2021).…”

Taking Stock and Moving Forward: A Personalized Perspective on Mixed Emotions

“…However, depending on the article, the simultaneous experience of positive and negative emotion may be referred to as mixed emotions (Berrios et al, 2015; J. T. Larsen & McGraw, 2014), mixed feelings (Schimmack, 2001;I. K. Schneider & Schwarz, 2017), co-occurrence (Scott et al, 2014), ambivalence (Cohen & Minor, 2010;Trémeau et al, 2009), emotional ambivalence (Fong, 2006;Rees et al, 2013), subjective ambivalence (Priester & Petty, 1996;Simons et al, 2018), emotional complexity (Bodner et al, 2015;Brose et al, 2015), poignancy (Ersner-Hershfield et al, 2008;Septianto, 2020), nostalgia ( Johnson-Laird & Oatley, 1989;Turner & Stanley, 2021), or affective synchrony (Rafaeli et al, 2007). As a result, critically reviewing literature on the simultaneous experience of positive and negative emotion is a difficult task partly because of the multitude of terms used to refer to the same phenomenon.…”