When Nostalgia Tilts to Sad: Anticipatory and Personal Nostalgia

Abstract

Contemporary research has showcased many benefits of nostalgia, but its bittersweet character and historical reputation as unhealthy raise the possibility of less favorable impacts. In recent studies, daily diary data highlighted nostalgia's mixed valence and suggested that nostalgia is more strongly associated with negative feelings. Variables that influence the adaptive or maladaptive dimensions of nostalgia have not yet been fully explored. Recently, a focus on when nostalgia is experienced relative to past and future was introduced in the construct of anticipatory nostalgia, missing the present prematurely before it has become past. Distinct from personal nostalgia, anticipatory nostalgia was found to be characterized by difficulty enjoying the present and a tendency toward sadness and worry. The present study examines the distinctive dynamics at play in anticipatory and personal nostalgia by exploring the relationship between each type of dispositional nostalgia and reported experience with happy and sad stories. The Nostalgia Inventory, the Survey of Anticipatory Nostalgia, and a brief form of the PANAS were completed by 144 undergraduates (110 women), who rated their exposure and reactions to happy and sad stories. Reported frequency of exposure to happy and sad stories was related to dispositional happiness and sadness. Personal and anticipatory nostalgia did not differ in frequency of exposure to happy and sad stories, but they did differ in reactivity to and learning from sad stories. Findings highlight the importance of the timing of nostalgia, consistent with the distinction between nostalgia for the past and nostalgia for what is still present.

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

“…Reflecting this possibility, we had overall low incidence and endorsement of negative affect, which may reflect range restriction resulting from misaligned adjectives (i.e., hostile, afraid); however, the relatively large within-person standard deviations suggest there was variability in response between surveys. More recently, some researchers have begun selecting subsets of emotional descriptors that may reflect underlying characteristics of nostalgia, such as cheerful and downhearted (e.g., Batcho, 2020; Batcho & Shikh, 2016). Given the unique bittersweet profile associated with nostalgia, perhaps a new “nostalgia state inventory” could better reflect this unique emotion by capturing moods such as melancholy or wistful.…”

Torn Between Valences: Mixed Emotions Predict Poorer Psychological Well-Being and Job Burnout

“…Specifically, the conflict hypothesis argues that mixed emotions in daily life may be conflicting and agonizing states that are unlikely to be beneficial for psychological well-being. Indeed, a recent study provided preliminary evidence that nostalgia—which has been widely conceptualized to be a mixed emotional state (Batcho, 2020 ; Sedikides & Wildschut, 2018 ; Vaccaro et al, 2020 )—tended to have negative links with well-being when assessed naturalistically (Newman et al, 2020 ) as opposed to mixed emotions that have often been examined under specific contexts (e.g., Berrios et al, 2018a ; Oh & Tong, 2021 ). Nevertheless, as nostalgia is a very specific mixed emotional state, it remains unclear whether these findings would generalize to mixed emotions occurring more generally amidst daily life.…”

Specificity in the Study of Mixed Emotions: A Theoretical Framework

“…Indeed, in addition to non-specific mix-valenced experiences, specific mixed emotions have been documented. For example, a commonly studied mixed emotion is nostalgia, in which one feels positively about the past alongside a sense of loss (e.g., Batcho, 2020). Although existing research has primarily focused on variants of mixed emotions involving underlying mixtures of happiness and sadness, more specific combinations have also been found.…”

“…The simultaneous experience of positive and negative emotions has been termed variously as mixed emotions (Larsen, 2017), emotional complexity (Grossmann et al, 2016), dialectical emotions (Leu et al, 2010), or emotional ambivalence (Rees et al, 2013). In addition, specific emotion labels that do not involve explicit pairings of discrete opposite-valenced emotions, such as “nostalgia” or feeling “moved,” have also been conceptualized as mixed emotions (Batcho, 2020; Menninghaus et al, 2015). For clarity of presentation, we use the term “mixed emotions” to refer to affective experiences comprising both positive and negative valence, encompassing both specific types of mixed emotions such as nostalgia and pairings of opposite-valenced emotions such as “happy-sad.”…”