Remembrance of things past: temporal change in the affective signature of nostalgic events

Abstract

We examined, through retrospective reports, the affect and emotion changes over time (from event occurrence to event recall) that characterise nostalgic events, and how those changes differ from the affect and emotion changes that characterise ordinary (Experiment 1) or neutral (Experiment 2) control events. In both experiments, nostalgic (but not control) events were characterised by a combined fading of positive affect and intensification of negative affect over time. Yet, nostalgic events were associated with more positive affect than control events, particularly at occurrence, but also at recall. In Experiment 1, this positivity of nostalgic (compared to control) events was a plausible statistical mediator of nostalgia’s psychological benefits. In Experiment 2, the fading of positive affect and intensification of negative affect associated with nostalgic events were plausibly mediated by, respectively, increases in the discrete emotions of regret and loneliness from event occurrence to event recall.

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ORCID for Tim Wildschut: orcid.org/0000-0002-6499-5487

ORCID for Constantine Sedikides: orcid.org/0000-0003-4036-889X

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