Nostalgia

A Psychological Resource

Clay Routledge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781848725171
• eBook ISBN: 9781317363736
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Kognitive Psychologie & Kognition

Nostalgia is a topic that most lay people are familiar with, but, until recently, few social scientists understood. Once viewed as a disease, nostalgia is now considered to be an important psychological resource. It involves revisiting personally cherished memories that involve close others. When people engage in nostalgia, they experience a boost in positive psychological states such as positive mood, feelings of social connectedness, self-esteem, self-continuity, and perceptions of meaning in life. Since nostalgia promotes these positive states, when people experience negative states (such as loneliness or meaninglessness), they use nostalgia to regulate distress.

This book explains in detail what nostalgia is, how views of it have changed over time, and how it has been studied by social scientists. It explores issues like how common nostalgia is and whether people differ in their tendency to be nostalgic. It looks at the triggers and inspiration for nostalgia, and the emotional states that are associated with it. Finally, the psychological, social, and behavioral effects of engaging in nostalgia are discussed.

This volume provides the most comprehensive overview to date of the social scientific research into the complex and intriguing phenomenon of nostalgia. It will be of interest to a range of students and researchers in psychology and beyond, and its accessible writing style and engaging anecdotes will also be appreciated by a wider, non-academic audience.

1 FROM THE PAST TO THE PRESENT

A History of Nostalgia

DOI: 10.4324/9781315669311-2

I recently had a very poignant experience. My wife and I attended a high school orientation with our daughter who had just started her freshman year. Of course, prior to this event I was fully aware of the fact that my daughter was about to begin her first year of high school. But to be honest, I had not put a whole lot of thought into the matter. Kids go to school and each year we take part in these back to school nights. It was old hat by this time. But this night I was sitting in the large auditorium of her high school and looked up at the screen of the presentation that was about to begin and saw the words “Class of 2017”. Then it hit me full force. My daughter is growing up and will be leaving our home before I know it. Where has the time gone? How could she already be starting her final years of secondary education? The room was spinning and I am sure I was noticeably uncomfortable.

In this moment of distress, my mind retreated to the past. It was just yesterday that we brought our sweet little baby girl home from the hospital. It was just yesterday that, after much anticipation, she took her first steps, said her first interpretable words, and started her first day of kindergarten. I savored these memories. In this moment of anticipated loss, I turned to nostalgia. And it provided some needed relief. It stabilized me. My daughter will soon be leaving the nest to start her own adult life in college and beyond. But my wife and I will always have these memories. And we can always return to them.

The Origins of Nostalgia as a Medical Disease

My anecdote about a recent experience of nostalgia is by no means unique. When the present or future seems overwhelming, we often look to the past nostalgically to right the ship (an idea I will consider in detail later in this book). In other words, distress, sadness, and loss often instigate nostalgia. But this idea of nostalgia being a response to psychologically negative experiences is a rather new observation, at least in the scholarly world.

The term nostalgia was coined in 1688 by the Swiss medical student Johaness Hofer (1688/1934). In his medical dissertation, Hofer described cases of an illness that bore similarities to afflictions observed in other countries: Schweizerkrankheit in Germany, mal du pays in France, and malatia del pais in Spain (McCann, 1941). Hofer was, however, the first to explicitly define this condition as an illness and crafted the word nostalgia from two sounds: nostos (return to the native land) and algos (pain). Nostalgia, then, as originally construed, is the pain caused by the desire to return to the one’s native land. Hofer conceptualized nostalgia as a medical disease afflicting Swiss soldiers and mercenaries who had travelled from their Alpine homes to the plains of Europe to wage war. Symptoms of this disease included constant thinking about home, sadness, anxiety, irregular heartbeat, insomnia, loss of thirst, disordered eating, physical weakness, and fever (McCann, 1941; Sedikides et al., 2015 a). In other words, nostalgia was believed to be causing a significant amount of psychological and physical distress. Ultimately, Hofer viewed nostalgia as a neurological ailment. He specifically proposed that nostalgia is a “cerebral disease” (Hofer, 1688/1934, p. 387) resulting from “the quite continuous vibrations of animal spirits through those fibers of the middle brain in which impressed traces of ideas of the Fatherland still cling” (ibid., p. 384).

Other physicians of the time accepted Hofer’s conceptualization of nostalgia as a disease. However, they offered divergent views on its etiology. For example, J.J. Scheuchzer (1732), a fellow physician, advanced the position that nostalgia was caused by “a sharp differential in atmospheric pressure causing excessive body pressurization, which in turn drove blood from the heart to the brain, thereby producing the observed affliction of sentiment” (cited in Davis, 1979, p. 2). Scheuchzer (1732) believed his account helped explain why nostalgia was afflicting Swiss soldiers who were fighting wars in regions with a much lower altitude than their homeland. Based on the assertion that nostalgia was a Swiss disease, other physicians of the time proposed that it was caused by the never ceasing clanging of cowbells in the Alps, which would cause trauma to the eardrum and brain (Davis, 1979). Regardless of the particular explanation, nostalgia was viewed as a neurological or medical illness well into the nineteenth century.

And despite early assertions that it was an ailment burdened largely by the Swiss, reports of nostalgia diagnoses were not confined to one particular nationality. For instance, nostalgia was observed among British soldiers (Jackson, 1986) as well as French soldiers fighting in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies (O’Sullivan, 2012). This nostalgia disease also reached beyond Europe. Indeed, during the American Civil War, Union physicians reported thousands of cases of nostalgia among Union soldiers (Matt, 2007). Some scholars even asserted that nostalgia was not exclusive to humans. Kline (1898), for instance, argued that nostalgia is experienced by dogs, cats, horses, and cows. I am trying really hard right now to imagine a nostalgic cow. Nope, can’t do it.

Nostalgia appeared to be a widely experienced illness, but an illness nonetheless, and one that seemed to be associated with separation from home. However, this view of nostalgia as a medical disease would eventually start to face some challenges. Physicians seeking to identify a bodily location of nostalgia were unsuccessful (Boym, 2001) and there was no evidence that people diagnosed with nostalgia were suffering from any actual bodily disease (Rutledge, 1977). In addition, Charles Darwin argued that nostalgia was, in fact, a feeling that could be rather pleasant (Sedikides et al., 2015 b). When describing people’s recollections on the past, Darwin (1896, chapter VIII, p. 216) wrote: “The feelings which are called tender are difficult to analyse; they seem to be compounded of affection, joy, and especially of sympathy. These feelings are in themselves of a pleasurable nature, excepting when pity is too deep, or horror is aroused, as in hearing of a tortured man or animal.”

Nostalgia and the Rise of Psychology

Medical scholars eventually abandoned the study of nostalgia. However, as the field of psychology grew in the early twentieth century, nostalgia again became a topic of scholarly interest. For psychologists from the psychoanalytic tradition, nostalgia was similar to depression and represented an “acute yearning for a union with the preoedipal mother, a saddening farewell to childhood, a defense against mourning, or a longing for a past forever lost” (Kaplan, 1987, p. 466). Nostalgia was now construed as an unpleasant state associated with difficulties of individuation or separation (Neumann, 1949/1971; Peters, 1985) or even a subconscious yearning to return to one’s fetal state (Fodor, 1950). Psychologists were thus continuing the tradition of viewing nostalgia as an ailment. They did not believe that nostalgia was necessarily a disease of the body. Instead, it was a disorder of the mind.

However, during this time, scholars started to distinguish nostalgia from the concept of homesickness. When nostalgia was originally considered as a medical disease, the focus was on a yearning for home. This focus made sense, because much of the medical interest in the topic revolved around soldiers who were far from and longing for home. With a new emphasis on a general longing for aspects of one’s past (e.g., childhood) as opposed to a specific longing for one’s home or homeland, during the twentieth century, views on nostalgia started to change. McCann (1941), for instance, recognized that just as people can long for home, they could also long for a wide range of objects or people. Indeed, psychoanalysts tended to believe that people could be nostalgic for any object that symbolized aspects of their past that they missed (Peters, 1985). The study of homesickness would continue with its focus on the specific longing for home and, more specifically, the distress associated with young people’s transitions away from the home environment (Hendrickson, Rosen, & Aune, 2010; Kerns, Brumariu, & Abraham, 2008; Thurber & Walton, 2007). But by the late twentieth century, for most scholars, nostalgia was no longer a concept equated with homesickness.

This broader view on what people could be nostalgic for was accompanied by a deeper consideration of what emotional states relate to nostalgia. Psychologists began to view nostalgia as a bittersweet emotion (Castelnuovo-Tedesco, 1980; Kaplan, 1987; Werman, 1977). Nostalgia was not simply an unpleasant emotional state akin to depression. It was also a pleasurable feeling. That is, scholars began to appreciate that nostalgia involves pleasant memories of the past. Thus, reflecting on or idealizing past experiences and states can generate positive feelings in the present. However, because one cannot return to the past, nostalgia also includes a sense of loss and longing. Furthermore, the memory itself may involve experiences that had both negative and positive elements. When this broader consideration of nostalgia as pleasure mixed with pain began to emerge, the view of nostalgia as a mental illness started to lose ground.

Scholars were beginning to see the upside of nostalgia. If nostalgia was an experience that could generate positive affective states, then perhaps it had psychological value. For example, Davis (1979) offered a positive take on nostalgia from a sociological perspective. He proposed that nostalgia helped people cope with major life changes or experiences of discontinuity by “encouraging an appreciative stance toward former selves; excluding unpleasant memories; reinterpreting ‘marginal, fugitive, and eccentric facets of earlier selves’ in a positive light; and establishing benchmarks of one’s biography” (pp. 35–36). Clinical psychologists were also beginning to consider the possible therapeutic benefits of nostalgia. For example, Mills and Coleman (1994) asserted that nostalgic reminiscence helps restore a sense of identity among older adults suffering from dementia. Hertz (1990) proposed that nostalgia may serve as a resource to help people cope with trauma. In general, by the end of the twentieth century, psychologists were beginning to embrace a more positive and functional view of nostalgia (Batcho, 1995, 1998). However, social scientists had yet to empirically explore nostalgia in a rigorous and systematic manner. For instance, even though experimental social psychology was thriving by the later part of the twentieth century, social psychologists had not tested the effects of experimentally manipulated nostalgia. Though nostalgia’s reputation was changing, much work was needed to determine whether the psychological consequences of nostalgia are generally negative or positive.

Nostalgia in the Age of Marketing

In the late 1980s, nostalgia became a topic of empirical interest in the field of marketing. Researchers in this area discovered that throughout life people feel attached to or display preferences for the products they consumed in their late teens and early twenties. For instance, people display an enduring preference for movie stars that were popular (Holbrook & Schindler, 1994) and films that they watched (Holbrook & Schindler, 1996) in their youth. Similarly, people like music that was popular in their teens and early twenties more than they like music that was popular before their teenage years or after their early twenties (Holbrook & Schindler, 1989). And males, but not females, exhibit a similar pattern of attachment to automobile models from their youth (Schindler & Holbrook, 2003). Studies such as these, which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 3, began to shed light on the potential power of nostalgia.

When it comes to aesthetic preferences and media consumption, nostalgia may influence consumer choice. Not surprisingly then, companies frequently employ nostalgia when marketing products (Havlena & Holak, 1991) and many films and television programs are created with the intent of capitalizing on nostalgia for past decades (Brown, Kozinets, & Sherry, 2003). And research suggests that such nostalgia-based strategies work. For example, Pascal, Sprott, & Muehling (2002) found that advertisements that induced nostalgia increased positive attitudes towards a brand and intention to purchase that brand. Similarly, Muehling & Pascal (2012) found that using nostalgia to advertise a product increased how much attention people paid to the ad as well as how favorably they viewed the ad and the brand being advertised.

In all, research focused on consumer preferences and responses to marketing campaigns and advertisements indicates that nostalgia influences attitudes and behaviors. And though this area of research continues to evolve by exploring variables that may moderate and mediate the effects of nostalgia-based marketing on consumer attitudes and purchases (e.g., Muehling, Sprott, & Sultan, 2014), it does not answer critical questions about the psychology of nostalgia. Of course, marketing researchers are most interested in determining whether or not nostalgia-based advertisements and products influence consumer behavior. Psychologists are needed to better understand how nostalgia affects mental states. However, until recently, nostalgia was not a topic of interest among empirical psychologists.

Toward a New Psychology of Nostalgia

The research from the field of marketing suggests that nostalgia is a feeling that people enjoy. If nostalgia was an unpleasant state, as originally believed, people would not be motivated to consume products that remind them of the past. People want to mentally time travel to the past. Nostalgia is a desired state. The concept of nostalgia has had an interesting journey from the late 1600...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. From the Past to the Present: A History of Nostalgia
• 2. How We Perceive and Experience Nostalgia
• 3. What Makes People Nostalgic?
• 4. The Affective Consequences of Nostalgia
• 5. The Social Functions of Nostalgia
• 6. The Self-Related Functions of Nostalgia
• 7. The Existential Functions of Nostalgia
• 8. Individual Differences and Nostalgia
• 9. The Future of the Past: Emerging Research on Nostalgia
• References
• Index