To Nostalgize

Abstract

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.

How nostalgia infuses life with meaning: From social connectedness to self‐continuity

“…As such, the findings establish an intricate chain of mechanisms through which nostalgia renders life meaningful and further illustrate how nostalgia facilitates human functioning Sedikides, Wildschut, Routledge, Arndt, Hepper, et al, 2015). To begin, the findings clarify why nostalgia increases MIL: It does so by fostering sequentially social connectedness and self-continuity.…”

“…We manipulated nostalgia with the Event Reflection Task (Sedikides, Wildschut, Routledge, Arndt, Hepper, et al, 2015). We manipulated nostalgia with the Event Reflection Task (Sedikides, Wildschut, Routledge, Arndt, Hepper, et al, 2015).…”

“…We were concerned with the role of self-continuity in accounting for why nostalgia increases MIL Sedikides, Wildschut, Routledge, Arndt, Hepper, et al, 2015). We formulated, tested, and supported three hypotheses: that self-continuity strengthens MIL (H1, Experiment 1); that self-continuity mediates the effect of nostalgia on MIL (H2, Experiment 2); and that self-continuity's mediation of the nostalgia-MIL relation is itself plausibly based on social connectedness (H3, Experiment 3-4).…”

“…In Hepper, et al, 2015). A meta-analysis is needed to establish conclusively the influence of nostalgia on affect.…”

The mnemonic muse: Nostalgia fosters creativity through openness to experience

“…It was historically regarded a brain malfunction, psychiatric disorder, or variant of depression (for a review, see Sedikides et al (2015)). Following due empirical scrutiny, the last decade has witnessed an overhaul in scholarly understanding of this emotion.…”