Nostalgia Now

Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on the Past in the Present

Michael Hviid Jacobsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032173887
• eBook ISBN: 9781000034097
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume explores the nature of nostalgia as an important emotion in contemporary society and social theory. Situated between the 'sociology of emotions' and 'nostalgia studies', it considers the reasons for which nostalgia appears to be becoming an increasingly significant and debated emotion in late-modern culture. With chapters offering studies of nostalgia at micro-, meso- and macro-levels of society, it offers insights into the rise to prominence of nostalgia and the attendant consequences. Thematically organised and examining the role of nostalgia on an individual level – in the lives of concrete individuals – as well as analysing its function on a more historical social level as a collective and culturally shared emotion, Nostalgia Now brings together the latest empirical and theoretical work on an important contemporary emotion and proposes new agendas for research. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory, psychology and cultural studies with interests in the emotions.

Part I

Conceptual and theoretical perspectives on nostalgia

1 Nostalgia: the paradoxical bittersweet emotion

Krystine Irene Batcho

Introduction

Looking to the future is undeniably a healthy perspective that embodies the seeds of hope for better days ahead. Scientific, technological and social progress has contributed to an enhanced quality of life, and the anticipation of cures and inventions reinforces a focus on the future. Amid excitement for progress, the experience of nostalgic yearning for the past may be difficult to understand.

The roots of nostalgia’s counterintuitive nature can be traced through its history. The physician Johannes Hofer coined the term nostalgia in 1688 to designate homesickness a medical disease with physical symptoms (Hofer 1688/1934). Since then, the meaning of the term nostalgia broadened to refer to yearning for the past and the understanding of the construct was transformed from that of disease to a universal phenomenon (Batcho 2013b). Not everyone leaves their childhood home, but everyone recognises the irreversible passage of time and can long for the past. A place can conceivably be returned to, but time cannot be recaptured. Nostalgia’s darker origin raises questions about the favourable image nostalgia enjoys in contemporary scholarship. Has the pendulum swung too far from disease to resource for well-being? This chapter explores how the paradoxical nature of nostalgia allows for the emergence of discrepant views of its impact.

Elements of the paradox of nostalgia

A bittersweet emotion

Nostalgia’s emotional character may be the most compelling of its paradoxical elements. Nostalgia entails pleasant feelings of happiness and comfort along with feelings of sadness, longing, and loss. Nostalgia poses the puzzle of how one can be happy and sad simultaneously. Some theorists have argued that one valence dominates the other. Combining nostos, return to the native land, and algos, suffering or grief, to convey the sad mood originating from the desire to return, Hofer recognised emotional pain as inherent in nostalgia. Building on its history, some theorists have framed nostalgia as inherently unpleasant. Roderick M. Peters (1985:135) described nostalgia as ‘a yearning the intensity of which varies from a fleeting sadness to an overwhelming craving that persists and profoundly interferes with the individual’s attempts to cope with his present circumstances’. Other theorists emphasised the positive. Harvey A. Kaplan (1987:465) defined nostalgia as ‘warm feelings about the past, a past that is imbued with happy memories, pleasures, and joys’ and identified it as ‘a universal affect that results in a heightened mental state, an enhancing, uplifting mood’.

The emphasis on positive versus negative affect may provide an incomplete picture of nostalgia. The distinctive characteristic of nostalgia is its blending of positive and negative into a unique bittersweet feeling. Pietro Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1980) attributed the bittersweet blend to the role of conflict integral to the longing for the past. Nostalgia is sweet, because the original event was pleasurable, and it is bitter, because it cannot be made to come back again.

Other theorists have argued that the sweet memories elicited by nostalgia are tinged with sadness by the recognition of the irretrievability of the past, given that the passage of time is irreversible. Nostalgic memories, therefore, make salient the irreplaceable loss of the longed-for sweet aspects of the past (Batcho 2007; Batcho et al. 2008). It is plausible to assume that during a nostalgic episode, pleasant memories activate positive emotions, while thoughts of irretrievable loss activate sadness. Jeff T. Larsen and his co-authors (2001) have argued that in most situations people feel either happy or sad, but certain bittersweet events can evoke both happy and sad feelings. They found that participants were more likely to feel both happy and sad after viewing the poignant film Life is Beautiful, when moving and on graduation day.

It is reasonable to imagine two emotions co-occurring. More challenging is explaining how they exist as a single blend. Rather than feeling two separate conflicting emotions, we experience nostalgia as a single emotion, analogous to savouring bittersweet chocolate as a flavour in its own right. The word bittersweet denotes the feeling of positive and negative as a unified emotion. Larsen et al. (2001) found that students were more likely to report explicitly the feeling of bittersweet on graduation day. Larsen and A. Peter McGraw argued that events comprised of pleasant and unpleasant aspects can elicit opposite-valence emotions, and that the happy and sad components of an emotion such as bittersweet do not diminish or neutralise each other (Larsen and McGraw 2011, 2014). It is not clear, however, when two emotions are being felt at the same time and when they are felt as one blended emotion. It is also not known how opposing components are combined into a unitary emotion. Its bitter dimension raises the question of nostalgia’s appeal. Why would we be attracted to triggers that evoke painful longing?

The past is gone but present

Nostalgia allows us to suspend temporarily the accepted properties of time. Experiencing the past as both present and absent at the same time, we feel as if we are in the past and in the present simultaneously. Unlike ordinary memory retrieval, nostalgia imbues reminiscence with a personal engagement that encourages identity exploration. Active involvement of identity serves to connect past and present in intimate fashion by highlighting the intrinsic self in both. Unlike in ordinary remembering, nostalgic yearning draws the past into the present in an effort to diminish temporal distance. Inevitably, the longing is confronted by the painful acknowledgement that the past is irretrievable, despite our immersion in it during reverie. Like dipping our toe in the pond while remaining on shore, nostalgia engenders the sense of being in two realities at the same time. We enjoy the feeling of having something without having it in actuality. Ironically, actually possessing it would invalidate it, or at least alter its inherent value substantially. Building castles with the sofa cushions meant so much to our three-year-old self, but would no longer have its magical quality now. Keeping it in our ‘present-past’ preserves its value while allowing us to enjoy it again.

Although trigger events have been identified, the motivation to seek or to indulge in nostalgic is not yet clear. Understanding that nostalgia engages past and present clarifies how it serves purposes beyond emotional regulation. As each moment passes, we, and the world we live in, change, typically in barely noticeable ways, but at times in dramatic fashion. Grasping part of our past can anchor us, like clinging to a branch along the shore as we are being carried downstream. For a time, we can appreciate how our authentic self remains despite the constant change inherent in life. By preserving continuity amid discontinuity, nostalgia helps us cope with the inevitable tension between the contradictory needs to adapt and grow while maintaining an enduring self. We are no longer three years old, and yet we are still that three-year-old.

The power to benefit or harm

The semantic evolution of the term ‘nostalgia’ reflects the paradox of the construct. When Hofer catalogued the harmful, potentially devastating, impacts of nostalgia, he was referring to severe homesickness. In the cases he discussed, home still existed, along with the possibility of returning there. In contemporary research, home has been replaced by a past that no longer exists and cannot be returned to. In Hofer’s framework, treatment entailed the return home or the promise of an imminent return. Once nostalgia came to designate longing for the past, such treatment options were no longer viable or even desirable. Furthermore, with the salient enhancement of the quality of life generated by progress, returning to the past or remaining fixated on it retained the pejorative stigma previously attached to homesickness.

Nostalgia’s valuing of the past appears to be incongruent with positive psychology’s increased attention to the importance of personal resources such as mindfulness and personal growth. Many positive psychologists would assume that looking to the past inhibits mindful engagement in the present, planning for the future and personal growth. However, evidence for the universality of nostalgia suggests that the emotion serves an adaptive purpose. Searching to identify such an adaptive function, many contemporary theorists have portrayed nostalgia as a beneficial psychological resource. It is counterintuitive to imagine that yearning for the past encourages one to appreciate the present and advance toward the future. Yet, contemporary researchers have argued that nostalgia is associated with positive impacts such as enhanced social connectedness, healthy coping skills, optimism and altruism. How immersion in the past can foster well-being and avoid the pitfall of becoming trapped in the past remains to be explained.

Research: definitions, measures and tasks

The desire to reconcile contradictory theories spurred empirical research into the purpose served by nostalgia. The evolution of the referential meaning of the word ‘nostalgia’ posed a challenge for how it should be operationalised for empirical investigations. Some researchers avoided explicit definitions of nostalgia and relied on tasks that captured essential components of the construct. Krystine I. Batcho (1995) incorporated the core element of missing the past into the Nostalgia Inventory (NI) by having respondents indicate how much they miss each of 20 items from when they were younger. Items include concrete things such as toys and your house and abstract concepts such as not having to worry and the way people were.

Paradoxically, the NI measure of missing the past was associated with positive emotions and attributes. Participants who scored high on the NI preferred activities with other people, recalled memories focused on people, and scored higher on emotional intensity (Batcho 1998). Nostalgia-prone participants preferred happy song lyrics, related more closely to lyrics focused on other people, and considered others in forming their sense of self (Batcho 2007; Batcho et al. 2008). Nostalgia proneness correlated with a warm view of the respondent’s personal past and the world when the respondent was younger (Batcho 1995, 1998; Batcho et al. 2011; Batcho and Shikh 2016). Nostalgia-prone individuals reported a favourable background of pleasant childhood emotional and social behavioural experiences and were more likely to rely on adaptive coping strategies (Batcho 2013a; Batcho et al. 2011). People prone to nostalgia displayed favourable attributes, but the nostalgic experience itself was bittersweet. Nostalgic song lyrics were characterised by the irreversibility of time, irreplaceable loss, and the irretrievability of the past (Batcho 2007; Batcho et al. 2008).

Many researchers evoked nostalgia by explicitly eliciting nostalgic and non-nostalgic memories. The Event Reflection Task (ERT) directed participants to think of a past event that they think about in a ‘nostalgic’ way, has personal meaning, is an important part of their past, and makes them feel most nostalgic (Wildschut et al. 2006). Overall, the ERT yielded a favourable image of nostalgic memories, and ERT-induced nostalgia was associated with heightened social bonding, positive self-regard, positive affect, interpersonal competence and emotional support. In later studies, researchers introduced the dictionary definition, ‘a sentimental longing for the past’, and obtained results consistent with prior studies. Induced nostalgia enhanced self-esteem, positive affect, social connectedness and secure attachment style, and lessened attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance (Wildschut et al. 2006, 2010). Nostalgia enhanced meaning in life and countered threats to meaning (Routledge et al. 2012).

Relying on dictionary definitions assumes that they reflect popular understanding of the construct. The layperson’s understanding of the term ‘nostalgia’ was explored in studies of the prototypical structure of the construct (Hepper et al. 2012). Central features of nostalgia included memory, remembering, reminiscence, feeling, thinking and reliving. Among central features were positively laden facets such as rose-tinted memory, fond memories, social relationships, happiness, and childhood, as well as less positive such as longing, missing, and wanting to return to the past. Peripheral features included comfort, wishing, dreams, mixed feelings, change, calm, regret and homesickness. Vignettes characterised by central features evoked greater nostalgia, higher positive affect, self-worth, and social connectedness. However, peripheral vignettes contained unfavourable attributes such as detached, lethargic, and wants to be alone, that could have injected bias against the peripheral condition. Many participants listed both positive and negative emotions. Erica G. Hepper et al. (2012) concluded that nostalgia involves mixed feelings, but prototypically the ‘bitter’ is less potent than the ‘sweet’. They argued that dictionary definitions do not include all of the features or adequately capture the structure of nostalgia.

Nostalgia does not always elevate positive mood

The evidence on whether nostalgia is emotionally positive, negative, or bittersweet is mixed. Although many studies found that nostalgia increases positive affect (Hepper et al. 2012; Stephan et al. 2012; Wildschut et al. 2006; Wildschu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction: in times of nostalgia: the brave new world of a grand old emotion
• PART I: Conceptual and theoretical perspectives on nostalgia
• PART II: Memory, politics and social critique in a mediatised era
• PART III: Consumerism, migration and everyday life
• Index