Poets, novelists, and screenwriters have frequently incorporated this mixed emotion throughout storylines and plots for many years, but a scientific understanding of the nature of nostalgia has only begun to emerge in the past few decades (e.g., Batcho, 2013 Sedikides et al., 2015).
Nostalgia has been defined as a sentimental longing for the past. “There is no greater sorrow than to recall a happy time when miserable.” These findings support a theoretical account that proposes that the effect of nostalgia on well-being depends on the natural context in which nostalgia is elicited. Thus, in contrast to experimental findings, nostalgia did not attenuate, but rather exaggerated the negative effects of loneliness on affective well-being. Viewed alternatively, the negative effects of loneliness on affective well-being were stronger on days when people felt more vs. The negative effects of nostalgia on affective well-being were significantly stronger on days when people felt more lonely as opposed to less lonely.
Using multilevel modeling, we found that nostalgia and loneliness were negatively related to positive affect and positively related to negative affect. We tested this theory by measuring daily states of nostalgia, loneliness, and affect across five daily diary studies ( N = 504 6,004 daily reports) that lasted for 14 days. We propose an alternative theory that posits that the effect of nostalgia on well-being depends on the event or experience that elicits nostalgia. In studies that have measured nostalgia in daily life, however, nostalgia has been negatively related to well-being. This restorative effect of nostalgia, however, has been demonstrated with cross sectional and experimental methods that lack ecological validity. One proposed function of nostalgia is to attenuate the negative consequences of loneliness. Research has suggested that nostalgia is a mixed, albeit predominantly positive emotion.
2Center for Science and Society, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States.1Psychiatry Department, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States.
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