We’ve all got nostalgic triggers embedded deep in our minds. We all have that arrangement of stimuli whose presence takes us back to another time in an instant. Nostalgia is an express ticket back to the past and we, for a while, get to become tourists in our own pasts. However, nostalgia can be a double-edged sword. It’s a cunning drug. It sometimes fools us into a revision of the past that it is inherently better than our present circumstances….Continue reading…
By: The Idea Zone
Source: Medium
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Critics:
Nostalgia’s definition has changed greatly over time. Consistent with its Greek word roots meaning “homecoming” and “pain,” nostalgia was for centuries considered a potentially debilitating and sometimes fatal medical condition expressing extreme homesickness. The modern view is that nostalgia is an independent, and even positive, emotion that many people experience often.
Nostalgia has been found to have important psychological functions, such as to improve mood, increase social connectedness, enhance positive self-regard, and provide existential meaning. Many nostalgic reflections serve more than one function, and overall seem to benefit those who experience them. Such benefits may lead to a chronic disposition or personality trait of “nostalgia proneness.”
Nostalgia has also been associated with learning and memory consolidation. Although nostalgia is often triggered by negative feelings, it results in increasing one’s mood and heightening positive emotions, which can stem from feelings of warmth or coping resulting from nostalgic reflections. One way to improve mood is to effectively cope with problems that hinder one’s happiness.
Batcho (2013) found that nostalgia proneness positively related to successful methods of coping throughout all stages—planning and implementing strategies, and reframing the issue positively. These studies led to the conclusion that the coping strategies that are likely among nostalgia-prone people often lead to benefits during stressful times.
Nostalgia can be connected to more focus on coping strategies and implementing them, thus increasing support in challenging times. Nostalgia sometimes involves memories of people one was close to, such as family members, romantic lovers, or friends, and thus it can increase one’s sense of social support and connections.
Nostalgia is also triggered specifically by feelings of loneliness, but counteracts such feelings with reflections of close relationships. According to Zhou et al. (2008), lonely people often have lesser perceptions of social support. Loneliness, however, leads to nostalgia, which actually increases perceptions of social support. Thus, Zhou and colleagues (2008) concluded that nostalgia serves a restorative function for individuals regarding their social connectedness.
Nostalgia serves as a motivator for the preservation of people’s cultural heritage. People endeavor to conserve buildings, landscapes, and other artifacts of historical significance out of nostalgia for past times. They are often motivated by a desire to connect to their heritage from past generations.This can manifest in living history events such as historical reenactments, which bring together people with a shared nostalgia for historical periods of past times.
These events’ hands-on, improvisational natures often facilitate socialization. Nostalgia serves as a coping mechanism and helps people to feel better about themselves. Vess et al. (2012) found that the subjects who thought of nostalgic memories showed greater accessibility of positive characteristics than those who thought of exciting future experiences.
Additionally, in a second study conducted, some participants were exposed to nostalgic engagement and reflection while the other group was not. The researchers looked again at self-attributes and found that the participants who were not exposed to nostalgic experiences reflected a pattern of selfish and self-centered attributes. Vess et al. (2012), however, found that this effect had weakened and become less powerful among the participants who engaged in nostalgic reflection.
Nostalgia helps increase one’s self-esteem and meaning in life by buffering threats to well-being and also by initiating a desire to deal with problems or stress. Routledge (2011) and colleagues found that nostalgia correlates positively with one’s sense of meaning in life. The second study revealed that nostalgia increases one’s perceived meaning in life, which was thought to be mediated by a sense of social support or connectedness.
Thirdly, the researchers found that threatened meaning can even act as a trigger for nostalgia, thus increasing one’s nostalgic reflections. By triggering nostalgia, though, one’s defensiveness to such threat is minimized as found in the fourth study. The final two studies found that nostalgia is able to not only create meaning but buffer threats to meaning by breaking the connection between a lack of meaning and one’s well-being.
Follow-up studies also completed by Routledge in 2012 not only found meaning as a function of nostalgia, but also concluded that nostalgic people have greater perceived meaning, search for meaning less, and can better buffer existential threat. Nostalgia makes people more willing to engage in growth-oriented behaviors and encourages them to view themselves as growth-oriented people.
Baldwin & Landau (2014) found that nostalgia leads people to rate themselves higher on items like “I am the kind of person who embraces unfamiliar people, events, and places.” Nostalgia also increased interest in growth-related behavior such as “I would like to explore someplace that I have never been before.”
In the first study, these effects were statistically mediated by nostalgia-induced positive affect—the extent to which nostalgia made participants feel good. In the second study, nostalgia led to the same growth outcomes but the effects were statistically mediated by nostalgia-induced self-esteem. One recent study critiques the idea of nostalgia, which in some forms can become a defense mechanism by which people avoid the historical facts.
This study looked at the different portrayals of apartheid in South Africa and argued that nostalgia appears as two ways, ‘restorative nostalgia’ a wish to return to that past, and ‘reflective nostalgia’ which is more critically aware. Nature-based factors such as weather and temperature can trigger nostalgia. Scientific studies have shown that cold weather makes people more nostalgic, while nostalgia causes people to feel warmer.
In some societies, elements of nature often trigger a nostalgia for past times when nature played a larger role in culture. Environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ in his 2003 book Solastalgia: a new concept in human health and identity. The word is formed from the Latin sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek root ἄλγος (pain, suffering) to describe a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental destruction.
Nostalgia differs from solastalgia because nostalgia is typically generated by spatial separation from important places or persons (one’s home, family, friends, or loved ones) with which it is often possible, in principle, to reconnect.
With solastalgia, in contrast, the grief is typically caused by environmental destruction, so the separation between subject and object is ontological rather than spatial: it is permanent and unbridgeable, and can be experienced while continuing to occupy the same irreversibly degraded place.
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