Principles of nostalgia: meta-analytic tests

Abstract

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for one's meaningful past, has a long and turbulent history. Once regarded a medical disease, psychiatric disorder, and clinical ailment, the emotion is now recognized to be frequent, positive, and occurring across ages. But when is nostalgia elicited and what is it for? Guided by relevant literature, and relying on experimental evidence, we derived five principles: Threat triggers nostalgia (Principle I); Nostalgia confers psychological benefits: dynamism, existential, social, consumption, morality, well-being (Principle II); Nostalgia's benefits generalize across cultures (Principle III); Nostalgia's benefits are contingent on its Person × Activity fit (Principle IV); Nostalgia is more than positivity (Principle V). We tested these principles meta-analytically using two datasets: (a) the Triggers dataset containing 102 effect sizes from 60 experiments reported in 34 documents (g = 0.428, 95% CI [0.361, 0.495]) in regard to Principle I, and (b) the Benefits dataset containing 1460 effect sizes from 347 experiments reported in 167 documents (g = 0.388, 95% CI [0.355, 0.420]) in regard to Principles II-V. The meta-analytic results were consistent with all five principles. Selection bias methods indicated a modest downward adjustment of the aggregate effect sizes. The findings contribute toward establishing nostalgia as a fundamental human emotion, relevant not only to psychology but also to allied disciplines.

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Identifiers

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

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

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