We feel more nostalgic as we get older — but it’s not always a positive experience

By Emily Reynolds

A song, a place, a smell… it doesn’t take much to be transported back in time. Just as with Proust and his madeleines, we all have specific memories that not only provoke nostalgia but trigger intense emotions.

And while nostalgia is often framed as a positive thing — a fond wistfulness — this isn’t always the case, as the University of Akron’s Jennifer R. Turner and Jennifer Tehan Stanley explore in a recent paper published in Emotion. They find that nostalgia is more common the older we get — and it can also set off both positive and negative feelings.

Participants were 100 adults ranging in age from 18 to 78. After sharing demographic data, participants downloaded an app to their phones on which they took daily questionnaires for two weeks. Every day after receiving a prompt, they completed a measure related to nostalgia, indicating whether or not they had experienced nostalgia during the day, what they were doing at the time, and who they were with. (They were given three criteria by which to measure nostalgia: an experience that is emotional and autobiographical, during which you relive moments or “takes you back”, and that is not actively sought.) Participants then indicated how positive or negative the experience of nostalgia made them feel; those who did not record nostalgia were asked how they felt in the moment they were taking the questionnaire.

As expected, age was a significant predictor of dail...

Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - January 13, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Developmental Emotion Thought Source Type: blogs