Mental transportation mediates nostalgia’s psychological benefits

ABSTRACT

Nostalgizing confers social, existential, and self-oriented psychological benefits or functions. But how does the experience of nostalgia conduce to these functions? We propose that it does so, in part, through mental transportation, which involves mentally leaving one’s current space and transporting oneself into a past event. We addressed the role of mental transportation in one daily diary study and two experiments (N = 514). By assessing daily experiences of nostalgia in Study 1, we found that, on days in which participants felt more nostalgic, they were more likely to experience mental transportation. Following a narrative induction of nostalgia, we assessed mental transportation (Studies 2 and 3) and the three putative nostalgia functions: social, existential, self-oriented (Study 3). Nostalgic (vs. control) participants reported greater mental transportation (Studies 2 and 3), which in turn was associated with stronger functions (Study 3). The findings portray mental transportation as a key mechanism underlying the psychological benefits of nostalgia.

KEYWORDS:

• Nostalgia
• mental transportation
• social connectedness
• meaning
• self-esteem

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As for most time-intensive protocols, we included several measures in the initial assessment and daily surveys for unrelated purposes. We only report measures relevant to hypothesis-testing.

2 We included a few more measures that were not pertinent to our hypothesis.

3 Additional analyses on the 8-item scale (i.e., excluding the three potentially inapplicable items) yielded results that were virtually identical to the reported ones.

4 In analyses on the 8-item mental transportation scale (excluding the three potentially inapplicable items), we obtained very similar results to those we report in the text.

Additional information

Funding

This publication was partially made possible by [grant number DGB3400] from the British Academy to Adam K. Fetterman. Information about the data and results can be accessed through the Open Science Framework (OSF): https://osf.io/pyzt2/