Blinded by wistfulness: on how nostalgia strengthens attitudes

ABSTRACT

Across four studies, we explored how feeling nostalgic about an attitude object impacts the metacognitive characteristics of the attitude toward that object and how those metacognitions predict the evaluation’s underlying strength. In each study, participants reflected on and evaluated a song or television show that either did or did not elicit nostalgia. Across these studies, we found support for the hypotheses that nostalgic attitude objects are viewed more positively, appraised with greater attitudinal importance, and exhibited less objective ambivalence. In Study 4, we observed that nostalgic attitudes are associated with greater behavioural intentions and that this relationship was mediated both by attitudinal importance and objective ambivalence. These studies contribute to our understanding of how nostalgia affects attitude formation processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Attitudes
• attitude strength
• emotion
• metacognition
• nostalgia

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For all studies discussed, post-hoc power analyses were conducted using G*Power (Faul et al., 2007), with the exception of Study 4, which employed a Monte Carlo simulation (Schoemann et al., 2017). The analyses were based on the smallest effect size observed for significant differences between conditions (d = .45 to .69). The results revealed Study 1 power at 94.24%, Study 2 power at 87.83%, Study 3 power at 72.27%, and Study 4 power at 90.69%.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.