Have you ever considered using nostalgia through music to help a patient cope with a medical procedure? Noriuchi M, et al. Memory and reward systems coproduce 'nostalgic' experiences in the brain. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. Barrett FS, et al. Neural responses to nostalgia-evoking music modeled by elements of dynamic musical structure and individual differences in affective traits. Video Series. Scheuchzer, who lived and worked around the same time as Hofer, had a similar view of nostalgia.
However, he argued that it was not a result of an internal imbalance of the mind, but a condition influenced by external factors. For many centuries, doctors persisted in understanding nostalgia as a state of ill health that required treatment. However, views around its mechanisms and typology, as well as around which demographics it affected, kept shifting over the years.
In a paper from , Profs Wildschut, Sedikides, and their colleagues note that, throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, doctors thought nostalgia only affected the Swiss, since they mostly observed it in the Swiss mercenary soldiers that lent their services to foreign armies. In the early 19th century, however, physicians had begun to acknowledge it as a widespread condition that they saw as a form of melancholy or depression.
Throughout the 20th century, doctors kept changing their minds about the nature of nostalgia, though they mostly associated it with homesickness, an unhelpful psychological mechanism experienced by students and migrants unable to adapt to a new life away from home. Symptoms included anxiety, sadness, and insomnia. By the midth century, psychodynamic approaches considered nostalgia a subconscious desire to return to an earlier life stage, and it was labeled as a repressive compulsive disorder.
Soon thereafter, nostalgia was downgraded to a variant of depression, marked by loss and grief, though still equated with homesickness. According to Profs Wildschut, Sedikides, and their colleagues, in the late 20th century, doctors and researchers started to differentiate between nostalgia and homesickness.
They suggest homesickness became conflated with mental health issues, such as separation anxiety, whereas nostalgia began to be associated with idealized images of childhood or past happy times.
So is nostalgia — and even homesickness — a sign that a person is unable to adapt to a new life, new surroundings, or the realities of adult life? Or does it also play a positive role in the human psyche? But while centuries of doctors considered nostalgia a deadly disease, we now know how wrong they were: Our longing for a lost time can help us make it through today.
This story appears in the Spring , Origins issue of Popular Science. It's up to you to come up with more rock puns, though. Perseverance is having a blast collecting specimens on the Red Planet. Agricultural runoff isn't the only thing polluting waterways worldwide.
Sign up to receive Popular Science's emails and get the highlights. Like science, tech, and DIY projects? More recently, Bocincova et al. Notably, a preregistered follow-up study did not replicate these findings FioRito et al. Further research is required to examine if, and how, nostalgia affects motivation as measured using social neuroscientific paradigms. Although previous research demonstrates that nostalgia is primarily focused on social relationships, almost no work has explored how nostalgia occurs in a social setting.
Nostalgia likely frequently implicates social interaction. Indeed, up to 75 percent of conversations may include nostalgic content Pasupathi et al. Therefore, future research should explore nostalgia as a shared experience. We define shared nostalgia as nostalgia transmitted to at least one other person or exchanged between two or more people. The nature of shared nostalgia needs to be determined.
How often does this occur? With whom? What is the role of approach motivation in sharing nostalgic memories with and between others? What social and emotional benefits, if any, can be gained? We posit that individuals share nostalgia for two purposes: to create and to maintain social connections.
The future-oriented qualities of nostalgia may prompt an individual to share a nostalgic memory with an acquaintance to build closeness. For instance, discussing a nostalgic childhood experience with a new acquaintance could promote self-disclosing behavior in both individuals. Does this boost a desire to deepen the relationship from acquaintances to friends?
Moreover, people may discuss a nostalgic memory with others who also experienced in order to maintain the established intimacy. As an example, a couple reflecting together on their first date may feel intimate feelings toward one another.
Does this, in turn, increase intentions to stay together? By definition, nostalgia is a past-focused affective experience. A growing body of evidence, however, documents the future-oriented nature of nostalgia. Specifically, people can reference their nostalgic past to remind themselves what it felt to be young Abeyta and Routledge, and loved e.
There are deviations from this process, however. For instance, Cheung et al. This construct is unique in that it does not rely on the reflections of the past. Instead, anticipated nostalgia is nostalgia for the present and the future e.
Critically, Cheung et al. Thus, anticipated nostalgia could be considered a future-focused experience that promotes future-oriented behavior. When discussing the future-oriented nature of nostalgia, individual differences should be considered, as well; not everyone benefits from using nostalgia e.
Future research should examine other instances in which nostalgia does not result in future-oriented behavior. Taken together, when individuals engage in nostalgic reflection, they are not hiding in the past.
0コメント