The sociality of personal and collective nostalgia

ABSTRACT

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for the past, is an ambivalent – albeit more positive than negative – emotion. Nostalgia is infused with sociality, as it refers to important figures from one’s past or to momentous life events that include those figures. Dispositional nostalgia is related to prejudice reduction via increases in a form of sociality, empathy. Experimentally induced nostalgia fosters sociality, operationalised as social connectedness (sense of acceptance). Social connectedness, in turn, has downstream consequences for (1) inspiration and goal-pursuit, (2) self-continuity and wellbeing, as well as (3) inclusion of an outgroup member in the self or outgroup trust and intergroup contact intentions. At the collective level, nostalgia confers sociality benefits to the ingroup (favourable attitudes, support, loyalty, collective action, barrier to collective guilt), but is also associated with negative sides of sociality such as outgroup rejection and exclusion. Collective nostalgia’s sociality is amenable to exploitation and can have controversial ramifications.

KEYWORDS:

• Nostalgia
• sociality
• inspiration
• self-continuity
• prejudice reduction

Notes

¹ We reviewed, and are referring to, the history of the construct “nostalgia.” For a long period, the construct was considered synonymous to “homesickness.” The term nostalgia, coined by Hoffer (1688), is a compound of two Greek words, nostos (return) and algos (pain), denoting psychological suffering induced by a desire (yearning) to return to one’s homeland. By the end of the 20th century, the constructs “nostalgia” and “homesickness” had gone their separate ways. A catalyst was Davis’s (1979) work, showing that university students associated words such as “warm,” “childhood,” “yearning,” and “old times” more frequently with “nostalgia” than “homesickness.” The homesickness literature is currently concentrating mostly on psychological adjustment problems (e.g., separation anxiety, depressive affect) that accompany the transition of young persons (e.g., boarding school pupils, university students) away from home (Fisher, 1989; Hendrickson, Rosen, & Aune, 2010; Thurber & Walton, 2007).

² Cheung et al. (2017) tested mediation using a single, bootstrapped mediational index (Hayes, 2017). This approach revealed that the indirect effect via anger was significant but the indirect via contempt narrowly failed to reach significance. Thus, the joint-significance test and the single-index test yielded different conclusions with regard to the mediational role of contempt.