Speaking of Psychology: Why nostalgia is good for you, with Tim Wildschut, PhD

Nostalgia is a bittersweet emotion, but psychologists’ research suggests that most of the time, it’s good for us—it can strengthen our relationships and give our lives meaning and continuity. Tim Wildschut, PhD, of the University of Southampton, discusses how researchers define nostalgia; why loneliness, a bad mood, and even a cold day can trigger it; when it can have downsides; and how technology is changing the way we look back at the past.

Tim Wildschut, PhD, is a professor of social and personality psychology at Southampton University in the U.K. He's a leading researcher on nostalgia whose work has helped overturn the long-held view of nostalgia as primarily a negative emotion.

Kim Mills: Think about your warmest memories. Maybe it’s the smell of your grandparents’ kitchen or the feel of a summer day that stretched out endlessly when you were a kid. Recollections like these often come with mixed emotions. You feel happy, but also a little sad, knowing that you can’t go back in time.

For centuries, nostalgia was thought of as something negative, a condition linked to sadness and depression. But in recent decades, psychological research has shown that nostalgia can actually be good for our mental health and wellbeing. So why is that? Where does nostalgia come from and what are its benefits and its potential downsides? How is technology and our ability to record nearly every moment of our lives changing the way we experience nostalgia? And can you feel nostalgic for things you never knew, from a time before you were born?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life.

I’m Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Tim Wildschut, a professor of social and personality psychology at Southampton University in the U.K. He’s a leading researcher on nostalgia whose work has helped overturn the long-held view of nostalgia as primarily a negative emotion. Dr. Wildschut has published hundreds of peer reviewed journal articles and his work has been covered by publications including The New York Times and The Washington Post. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Dr. Wildschut, thank you for joining me.

Tim Wildschut, PhD: Thank you for having me.

Mills: How do you define nostalgia in your work? Does the academic definition mostly track with the way people think of it in everyday use?

Wildschut: Yes. We define nostalgia as a sentimental affection for the past, particularly for a meaningful memories often involving other people. That’s how people tend to use it in everyday language. It hasn’t always been used in that way. As you mentioned, even in the 1950s, nostalgia was often equated with homesickness, but gradually that has changed both in the way people use it in everyday language and the way it’s been used in the scientific literature.

Mills: How does nostalgia differ from merely reminiscing or even ruminating?

Wildschut: I think compared to rumination, certainly nostalgia is more positive. It focuses on, as I mentioned, very meaningful, unique memories that really stand out in your recollection. And I think reminiscence is a more general term. It can cover a lot of ways of engaging with the past. Sometimes reminiscence might be counterfactual, so if only I could go back in time and change things, and it may take on a ruminative or brooding character. Nostalgia is a quite discrete, unique emotion. So it really is about these very unique memories that really stand out for being particularly meaningful, particularly warm often. And as I mentioned previously, often involve relationships with other people. So it may be about friends, family members, brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents. So for many people, it’s a way of bringing these individuals, these important individuals closer. Even if they may not be physically close, you can still bring them close in memory and enjoy the benefits of experiencing that closeness.

Mills: Now I mentioned in the introduction that you found in your research that nostalgia has psychological benefits. Can you talk about that? I mean, how is nostalgia good for us?

Wildschut: Yeah, there are a number of benefits. I will highlight three of them, which I think are the most robust ones. First one is social connectedness, and I’ve already alluded to that. Nostalgia is often about other people and you bring them close and you enjoy the benefits of that closeness. You feel warm and protected like you can trust others. You’re reminded that you had good relationships in the past, good friends, and also that you can be a good friend or a relationship partner to others. And so nostalgia increases interpersonal competence and your confidence in interpersonal interactions, new interpersonal interactions, meeting new people and so on. And from social connectedness then flow a host of other benefits.

Another key benefit is meaning in life. So nostalgia reminds you of the things that make life worth living. Part of that is relationships, but not just that. It might also be beautiful scenery you’ve witnessed and memorable holidays, vacations you’ve been to, places you’ve visited and so on. So nostalgia reminds you of the things that make life worth living that imbue life with meaning, the things that really matter in life.

And then a third key benefit is self-continuity. Nostalgia helps you to identify common threats that run through your life. These were the things I enjoyed as a child. I still enjoy them now as an adult or I want to pass them on to my children. And these are also things that I will probably continue to value in the future, things like hobbies. I enjoyed cycling as a child. I still enjoy cycling. I want to get my kids into cycling and I cannot imagine a life without cycling. And that comes with many nostalgic memories of, it can be your first bike or anything associated with that. And so it reminds and nostalgia helps you to identify these common threads. It may also be things like traditions or rituals, Christmas celebrations where you had certain family traditions, ways of celebrating that that you carry through, pass on to the next generation. And so it helps to identify those values in life.

Mills: What are some of the potential downsides of nostalgia? I mean, can you get too wrapped up in looking backwards?

Wildschut: In our research, we have rarely encountered downsides, which is not meant to say that we have never encountered them. So there’s some notable cases where, for example, we did a study with Syrian refugees living in Saudi Arabia. So during the Syrian civil war, many Syrians fled to neighboring Saudi Arabia, and we did an experiment there among that population where we instructed some of them to recall a nostalgic memory and others to recall an ordinary memory. That’s a common experimental induction that we have used, and then asked them to report on the psychological benefits that we just discussed. And although they experienced some of the psychological benefits of nostalgia, for example, they had increased meaning in life, they also experienced some downsides of nostalgia. For example, they scored lower on inspiration and optimism, things that are future oriented. Perhaps that was because they had really lost their home and they had lost their—their way of life had been completely destroyed. Perhaps one can speculate that being reminded of that way of life made the loss very salient and made them less optimistic about the future.

So we did a similar study with people residing in Gaza, and there we observed a similar mixed pattern. So yes, some of the benefits of nostalgia emerged even under those extreme circumstances. So for example, nostalgia increased social connectedness, the sense of belongingness, but it also had some downsides as we observed in the population of Syrian refugees. So perhaps there are some very extreme circumstances under which bring to mind these very valuable experiences, memories from the past, confront one—or make salient the losses that you’ve experienced. A little caveat is that both of these studies were done in Middle Eastern cultures, and perhaps it may be a language issue. So it would be very interesting to do a similar study in a Middle Eastern country where there isn’t this trauma.

Mills: Are there particular things that tend to trigger nostalgia? I mean, a lot of us, I’m sure, are aware of Marcel Proust and the madeleine. So what sets us off?

Wildschut: Yeah, Proust is of course a beautiful example. So scents, tastes can trigger nostalgia. Music can trigger nostalgia quite powerfully. So there are these sensory triggers of nostalgia. Another trigger of nostalgia is a psychological threat, and we are actually quite surprised by that in the initial studies. So in the earliest studies on nostalgia, we started out really in a very simple way by asking participants, okay, when do you become nostalgic? Write about it. So it was very descriptive work, very exploratory. And to a surprise, these participants mentioned negative states. So I become nostalgic when I’m a bit down or when I’m a bit lonely. Nostalgia is the holiday of my mind, one person wrote, so when I need a break.

Mills: You remember something pleasant.

Wildschut: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like—The Sound of Music comes to mind—when the bee stings, when you think of your favorite things. Yeah, so inspired by those findings, we conducted experiments. So in one experiment, we induced negative mood and compared it to positive mood and neutral mood. And we found that participants who were placed in a negative mood reported more nostalgia than those in the neutral or positive mood condition. And then another experiment, we induced loneliness. So we had some way of making people believe that they were a bit lonely compared to others. And in another condition, we had a way of making people believe that they’re less lonely than most other people. And when people thought they were lonely, they were more nostalgic.

So since then, not just us, but different laboratories have done these studies as well, showing that various psychological threats trigger nostalgia. So it can be social anxiety or loneliness or disillusionment. We also have evidence that it’s not just psychological threats, but even environmental or external threats can trigger nostalgia. So people tend to be more nostalgic on cold days or when they hear thunder, things that are threatening, a little bit alarming, and those circumstances trigger nostalgia as well. So yeah, the sensory trigger is very powerful, but they’re also these sort of threats, these things that make you feel uncomfortable and look for a source of comfort to compensate.

Mills: Are there different points in life when we’re more prone to nostalgia? I’m asking because I’m wondering, are older people more nostalgic than younger people, and do children experience nostalgia?

Wildschut: Again, the results are a bit surprising because the relationship between age and nostalgia that maybe a caricature of nostalgia would predict isn’t really there. Maybe older people are a little bit more nostalgic than younger people, but the association between age and nostalgia is very small, negligible, I would say almost.

And what really stands out much more, to me at least, is that the intensity of nostalgia that young people can experience, even very young people, like children as young as 9, 10 can experience nostalgia. So in some countries I’m told, for example, Japan and China, very young children will use the word nostalgia in those languages. I don’t think—in the U.K. or the U.S. or the Netherlands where I grew up, I don’t think children, very young children use the word nostalgia, but you can very, very easily explain it to them. So we used cartoons. For example, one cartoon shows a girl looking at a photograph and she has this thought bubble, and in the thought bubble you can see her skip rope with her friends.

And we would say, Okay, this is Leah and she’s thinking of skipping rope with her friends and it makes her feel happy, but also a little sad. Leah’s experiencing nostalgia. Do you experience nostalgia? And when you approach it that way, the kids get it immediately. They have implicit knowledge and you can use that to teach them the meaning of the word. And when we do that, first of all, you get very reliable individual differences. So some kids score high on the scale and some kids score low. So there is already that variation, and that is then correlates with some of the same variables that you see in adults. So in adults, there’s a very robust, replicable correlation between nostalgia and empathy. So more nostalgic adults are more empathetic, and the same thing with the little children, the more nostalgic kids are more empathetic. So I find that really interesting.

Mills: I want to talk about something I’ve been reading a lot about, which is Gen Z getting very interested in flip phones and vinyl records and fashion from the early 2000s. Can you feel nostalgia from a time that you never actually experienced?

Wildschut: That’s a difficult one. I think when it comes to studying nostalgia, it’s important to, from a researcher’s perspective, from my perspective, from my collaborator’s perspective, it’s important to sort of delineate the construct you’re going to study and say, Okay, we’ll study everything within this domain, but these are the boundaries.

One reason for that is not to become overwhelmed. Another reason is to have some sort of definitional clarity about what is and what isn’t nostalgia. And so we’ve always regarded or limited ourselves to nostalgia for events that you’ve personally experienced. So that’s how we delineated it. And so if you haven’t personally experienced it, it may look like nostalgia and resemble it, but it’s not nostalgia. Now, that is in a way an arbitrary boundary that motivated by the things I mentioned, the need for definitional clarity, the need to not become overwhelmed by everything that maybe could be considered nostalgia because there are loads of phenomena that you could argue are nostalgia, but we would say aren’t really because you haven’t personally experienced it.

Anyway, a long-winded way to say we don’t consider that nostalgia, but it may serve some of the same psychological benefits as nostalgia. We haven’t done research on it and there’s very little research on this historical nostalgia. To me, it comes across as quite an aesthetic thing. You see things from another era that sort of look beautiful or intriguing, and perhaps a better label for that would be antiquarianism. I think that, yeah, it’s a very aesthetic preference for things from another area that clearly shows some kind of excellence in the way it was manufactured or a certain beauty that is attractive.

Mills: I understand you believe nostalgia is more prevalent today than it has been in the past, and some of that may have been triggered by the pandemic, but maybe you can explain why you think nostalgia may be on the rise, or is it that people are just more aware of it like yourself studying it?

Wildschut: I think one of the fascinating things of about nostalgia is that you can really trace it back a very long time. The Gilgamesh epic is about this friendship where Gilgamesh laments the loss of his friend, Enkidu, and remembers the experiences they had together and the battles they fought, and it’s very nostalgic. So it’s almost like as soon as people started recording these stories in writing, what did they write about—nostalgia of course. The Odyssey is a similar story. It’s about this longing to return home that drives on our hero. He’s stuck on an island with a beautiful—Calypso, and still he longs to return to his wife Penelope and his son and his dog. So again, a very nostalgic story.

But you can go even further back, arguably, before any recorded history and look at, for example, stone tools that were left behind. There’s evidence that not even homo sapiens, but ancestors to homo sapiens had a preference for collecting stone tools that had been used already and repurposing them, even though it might’ve been easier to just manufacture a new tool. There’s some evidence from excavations in Israel where these tools had two layers of patination, so an old layer and a newer layer showing that they’ve been reused and repurposed. So they liked their old tools and they made them into new tools. So again, we don’t have a record to say that they felt nostalgia, but it’s indicative. So you can go back all the way several hundred thousand years and see this evidence of what certainly looks like nostalgia. So I would say it’s a basic emotion that’s really part and parcel of who we are and has always been with us.

Mills: Today we take photos and videos constantly. Our cell phones, our social media accounts resurface these memories for us all the time, whether we want them or not. They get fed to us. Do you think these constant reminders of the past are changing how people experience nostalgia?

Wildschut: I think they certainly make it easy to feel nostalgic when you want to. They put nostalgia at the tip of your fingers, really. In the past, probably people would experience nostalgia more when they met up with friends, talked to friends, shared memories and experiences that they had together. These days, certainly in some cultures, people maybe interact less with each other and more with their phones, and so would experience nostalgia more frequently in that way. I mentioned in some cultures, and I’ll just digress slightly, but I recently spent a few days with my family in Rome, and we had an apartment in an apartment complex and several stories high, and I was looking across this park. And on a Saturday night, the park was filled with young people to the brim, and there wasn’t a phone in sight. They were all talking in groups and moving from one little huddle to the next little huddle and just chatting and laughing. And it was a real eye-opener. I though, gosh, these kids, the lessons they’ll learn doing that and the skills they will develop doing that. And probably they might’ve been exchanging of nostalgic stories there too and memories that they shared. But I was struck by that and thought, gosh, that is really different, very different from what I might observe here in Southampton. I think it would be exceedingly rare and people spend more times on their phones or behind their screens. So I think probably yes, nostalgia through screens, very common, but there are also different cultural differences there, and some cultures still have this sort of communal sharing of memories in those traditions.

Mills: In addition to the personal nostalgia that we’ve been talking about, you’ve studied something called collective nostalgia. Can you talk about that and explain how it differs from the nostalgia we’ve been discussing?

Wildschut: Yeah. Collective nostalgia often takes the form of national nostalgia. So it might be nostalgia for an ostensible glorious national past. And it’s a complex beast because in quite a number of studies, that kind of national nostalgia is linked to anti-immigrant sentiment and opposition to immigrant rights and ethnocentrism and so on, but not in all studies. So it depends on the content of the national nostalgia. National nostalgia can also be about a time when we were more tolerant and more accepting of diversity and celebrated diversity. So there are these different conceptions of what this ostensible glorious past looked like. Some people may have one view of what the past, what that looked like, and others will long for other aspects of their nation’s past. And so depending on the content, it can either predict opposition to immigration or tolerance or welcoming of immigrants. So that’s just one example, but it really depends on what the content of this national or collective nostalgia is. Of course, it’s not always about nations. It can also be about organizations or smaller units than nations.

Mills: Well, just to wrap up, what’s next for you? What are you working on now? What are the big questions you’re trying to answer?

Wildschut: One line of research that we focused on recently has to do with attitudes towards AI, because AI, of course, is on everyone’s mind. It’s very novel. It precipitates change, and we study how nostalgia shapes attitudes and reactions to that. So on the one hand, nostalgia promotes or induces skepticism about change. Is this a good thing? Is it going too quick? And so on. And that predicts negative reactions to AI, but there’s also another process and that runs through connectedness. So when you feel socially connected and secure, that fosters exploration and openness to new ideas. So nostalgia can also foster openness and adoption of AI through this social connectedness mechanism. So, yeah, when things change, on the one hand, nostalgia induces this skepticism, this reluctance when things move very quickly. On the other hand, this sense of connectedness makes you more prepared to give it a go and see how things pan out.

Might this be useful? Might this be helpful for other people, for me? Another example would be the benefits of sharing nostalgia with others. So what kind of impressions do we form of nostalgic people? When I share my nostalgic memories, what kind of impressions do others form of me as opposed to when I share another type of memory? So our findings suggest that we perceive nostalgic individuals as quite agreeable and warm and so on, as you might expect. So you could say that nostalgia is really also for sharing. It’s not just something for yourself, but something I would encourage people to share with others.

Mills: Well, thank you. That’s a good tip. So I want to thank you, Dr. Wildschut, for joining me today. This has been a lot of fun to talk to you about the good old days.

Wildschut: Thank you very much. It’s been great to be on your podcast.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future episodes, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.