The Psychology of Nostalgia
As I was driving home from school for spring break, “Steal My Girl” by One Direction came blaring through my car’s speakers. With the sun streaming in bright and warm through the windshield, my backpack at my feet, and my mom beside me, I was taken back to the warm early fall days of 2014 when the song was first released. In a second, I remembered dancing in my room with my sister to their newest album, wearing matching One Direction nightgowns and shouting into our inflatable microphones. Now, as I’m approaching 20 and my college life has brought countless changes, I feel disappointed to be driving home for only one week to spend with my siblings. But this memory came in just like the sun through the windshield, and I was comforted by the simplicity of childhood connection.
Everyone has experienced a feeling like this at some point in their life. Maybe it was triggered by an old song or the smell of a candle. But, no matter what triggered it, it’s all the same feeling — nostalgia.
Christopher Ball, an associate professor of psychology, has research interests in memory, cognitive psychology, and the connection between memory and psychopathology. In an interview with Flat Hat Magazine, he discussed concepts related to nostalgia, autobiographical memory, and the history of memory research. Ball was not always interested in psychology. In fact, he did not even major in the field during his undergraduate career, instead studying computer science, engineering, and mathematics. After college, he got a job writing software for psychology experiments and started to study psychology part-time before eventually earning another degree in the field and, later, a doctorate in cognitive psychology. He has conducted research in memory and teaches a class at the College on autobiographical memory, making nostalgia a key point of his interest and expertise.
Nostalgia itself is a complex and often misunderstood emotion with a complicated history in the field of psychology. It is now often defined as a sentimental, often bittersweet, remembrance of the past, according to David Ludden at Psychology Today. However, the term was first introduced in 1688 by medical student Johannes Hoffer, who defined the feeling as what we know today as homesickness — not nostalgia. Homesickness is an anxiety-ridden emotion that creeps in when we are separated from people, places, or circumstances that are familiar to us.
Ball described how the line between nostalgia and homesickness has not always been distinct.
“A lot of [Hoffer’s] research had come from soldiers, Swedish soldiers,” he shared. “And it seemed like what he was describing was more homesickness, which is kind of similar, but different from nostalgia. It got lumped into this kind of, you know, being obsessed with the past, ruminating about it, losing touch with the present, having this negative kind of cycle.”
This historical lack of separation between the concepts of nostalgia and homesickness has complicated how nostalgia is studied and defined. For many years, nostalgia has been mislabeled as a longing to return to the past, or dwelling too much on our past experiences. This is now understood to be wrong, and we have learned that nostalgia is actually a very future-oriented experience, as addressed in a paper titled, “Is Nostalgia a Past or Future-Oriented Experience? Affective, Behavioral, Social Cognitive, and Neuroscientific Evidence” by Taylor FioRito and Clay Routledge for Frontiers in Psychology.
Nostalgia is triggered by a number of different things. It can be brought out by external stimuli, such as scents, tastes, colors, scenes, or music, as noted by Ball. However, it can also be prompted by our emotional state. Whereas researchers initially believed that nostalgia was tied to negative emotions because our focus on the past made us sad and disappointed, it turns out that it is the other way around. When people experience large life transitions, a loss of something constant, or symptoms of anxiety and depression, nostalgia can be a very helpful tool, as discussed in an article from David Webb on All About Psychology. When we feel lonely, sad, unsure, or like we have lost our purpose, remembering a time from our past can help us to reconcile these feelings and come out of the experience feeling much better.
Think about the types of memories that your brain calls forward when you’re feeling nostalgic: they are most likely associated with times when you were happy, fulfilled, and connecting with other people. The types of memories that make us feel nostalgic are key to understanding nostalgia’s purpose. When we are sad, we think about a time that we were happy; when we are moving to a new stage of life, we reminisce on a past stage; when we feel lonely, we remember good times with our friends and family.
Nostalgia deploys these positive memories to boost our mood in times of need. By providing us with reminders of happy times and positive connections, nostalgia helps us recover from feeling down in the dumps. The common occurrence of memories revolving around a connection with a friend, coworker, or family member has brought us to an understanding that nostalgia helps us to feel socially competent, connected, and capable, therefore also boosting our self-confidence, which was discussed in a podcast by the American Psychological Association, with an interview from Krystine Batcho. With our memories keeping us connected to people and events in our past, nostalgia also acts as a measure of both continuity and change across our lives. For example, as I watch my sister start packing for college, I remember when we were kids and she needed me to walk to school with her every morning, and I feel nostalgic for those times. However, though I feel sad to see her moving to this new part of her life, I’m now proud of how far she’s come and what she is going to accomplish in her next stage of life. Reflecting on memories like these allows us to see that not everything in our lives is lost or changing — we are still the same person, and things may be different but they will always work out.
Ball shared that the positive effects of nostalgia are particularly present in older populations, who experience high amounts of nostalgia.
“For one thing, people who are older, elderly people, are more likely to retrieve positive memories than negative memories, which is kind of counterintuitive, but it's called the positivity bias,” Ball said. “The argument being that they know that their time of life is coming near an end, so they want to focus on the positive aspects of the past.”
No matter what age you are, nostalgia shows us the good parts of our past to help us be happier with where we are now. In Ball’s autobiographical memory class, students discuss the intrinsic link between nostalgia and aging.
“We look at childhood amnesia, we look at autobiographical memories through infant time. And then we look at the reminiscence bump, which is the fact that most older adults retrieve memories from the ages of 15 to 30.” Ball said.
But while we have learned more about nostalgia, there is still a large body of knowledge missing that prevents us from fully understanding the phenomenon. What happens in our brain and body when we feel nostalgic? Why do we recall the specific memories that we do?
Ball discussed his hypothesis regarding the second question.
“So these are two questions that have plagued me in my whole career: Why that memory, and why that memory now?” he said. “My feeling about that is that memories are constantly being activated, but for the most part, they’re inhibited from being recalled. And so, some memories are closer to activation than others. And then when we do want to recall a memory, that one is the one that we recall.”
The activation pathways of memories involve numerous parts of our brains, a variety of sensory receptors and neurotransmitters, and further processes of memory formation, storage, and consolidation. Unfortunately, these pathways are not fully understood, and Ball’s two questions have no concrete answer or consensus in the field of psychology. With so much information missing or misunderstood within the current body of research, how can we move forward? Psychology has experienced a boom in interest regarding memory and nostalgia in recent years, which has led to significant discoveries including findings of its positive effect and its connections to age. That being said, studying nostalgia is incredibly tricky. This is in part because everyone experiences memory recall at different times from different triggers, and everyone rates their experience of a memory’s vividness, effect, and nostalgic factors very differently and subjectively. A common method of studying nostalgia is asking subjects to keep a diary where they note when, where, and how they experienced nostalgia, though this comes with a lot of issues for bias or personal differences, as Ball discussed in his interview. Researchers also cannot force participants to have nostalgic memories on the spot. However, there are many interesting directions for the future of nostalgia research.
One new avenue being explored is the concept of collective nostalgia. Ball defined the study of collective nostalgia as “nostalgia at a national or a cultural level and how that can be a positive, but also it can be a negative thing.” So, collective nostalgia can allow for a large group of individuals to feel connected and understood, however, it can also be exploited by governments when they define the “good times” of the past in harmful ways, or idealize past situations to appeal to people’s emotions, allowing for powerful officials to gain more support.
Another approach is the current influence that social media has on nostalgia. Does it make us more or less nostalgic? How does it impact memory recall when we are experiencing nostalgia?
Increased documentation of the past, a hallmark of the social media era, is one way that Ball considers may change the way we experience nostalgia.
“[There's] only two photos of me as a child, where there's probably 2,000 photos of you as a child,” Ball said.
Though it has a long history, there is still so much that is unknown about nostalgia. While we have grown to learn and appreciate the positive effects of nostalgia, we must also not let those feelings slip into their negative counterpart, homesickness. In college, we learn from so many changes and new experiences, and it's incredibly common to feel nostalgic. However, our professors, parents, and grandparents all experience nostalgia, too. The future of understanding nostalgia research is very bright, and will lead to a lot of important findings on how our brains and memories work. In the meantime, I’m going to keep listening to my One Direction CDs and letting nostalgia lift me up.