Home // News & Advocacy // Podcasts // Speaking of Psychology // Speaking of Psychology: Does nostalgia... Speaking of Psychology: Does nostalgia have a psychological purpose? Episode 93 – Does Nostalgia Have a Psychological Purpose? What psychological purpose does nostalgia serve? Is it good or bad? Are we more nostalgic today in our hectic, connected world? Is there such a thing as the “good ‘ol days”? Here to help explain is Krystine Batcho, PhD, professor of psychology at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York. She’s an expert on nostalgia and developed the Nostalgia Inventory, a survey that assesses proneness to personal nostalgia. About the expert: Krystine Batcho, PhD -- research has ranged from early work in human-computer interaction to the impact of higher education on the development of moral and social responsibility. Her current research on the psychology of nostalgia began with her introduction of the Nostalgia Inventory, a survey that assesses proneness to personal nostalgia. The Nostalgia Inventory has been translated into multiple languages, made available as an app and has been used in numerous research studies. Her scholarly publications -- host, Kaitlin Luna. Nostalgia, that longing feeling for the past when things seemed better, easier, and more fun. It's the feeling behind countless number one hits. It's what's resurrecting old TV shows and being capitalized on by politicians. We all know the feeling. Some of us maybe a little too well. What psychological purpose does nostalgia serve? Is it good or bad? Are we more nostalgic today in our hectic connected world? Is there such a thing as the good old days? Here to help explain is Dr. Krystine Batcho, professor of psychology at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York. She's an expert on nostalgia and develops the nostalgia inventory, a survey that assesses proneness to personal nostalgia. Welcome, Dr. Batcho. Dr. Krystine Batcho: Thank you so much. I love talking about nostalgia. Thank you for inviting me. Luna: Absolutely. Absolutely, we look forward to hearing all about it. As a psychologist and a researcher of nostalgia, how do you describe nostalgia? Batcho: That's a very important question because today many people are researching nostalgia, but they might be using the word differently. In fact, some people are probably talking about a slightly different experience or construct. I'm pretty faithful to the origins of the word nostalgia. The word was coined or invented a long time ago, over 300 years ago, and originally designated homesickness. Well, semantic drift over the centuries has broadened that to the notion of longing for or missing aspects of a person's personal lived past. That is the kind of nostalgia or that is what I mean when I talk about nostalgia and it's a wonderfully complex paradoxical experience. Luna: Can you talk about the role of nostalgia in the human psyche. Why do we have that feeling? Batcho: Most of the research available today including my research argues that nostalgia serves a number of functions. The thing that ties them all together is that nostalgia is an emotional experience that unifies. One example of this is it helps to unite our sense of who we are, our self, our identity over time. Because over time we change constantly we change in incredible ways. We're not anywhere near the same as we were when we were three years old, for example. Nostalgia by motivating us to remember the past in our own life helps to unite us to that authentic self and remind us of who we have been and then compare -- That gives us a sense of who we want to be down the road in the future. The other way that nostalgia serves an essential psychological function is that it is a highly social emotion. It connects us to other people. It does that and so many beautiful ways. In the beginning, when we're -- our life, our parents, our siblings, our friends. As we go through life, it can broaden out and extend to a wider sphere of the people we interact with. It's a social connectedness phenomenon and nostalgia is in that sense a very healthy pro-social emotion. -- and being able to revisit it and relive it again. Luna: You've explained that there's two different kinds of nostalgia. There's the personal which we've just touched on and historical. Can you explain what each one is? Batcho: In fact today, many people are arguing that there are even more varieties of nostalgia but when I first began collecting empirical evidence in the mid-1990s, I knew that another inventory existed. It was put together by a psychologist named Holbrook. That one contained items that were more oriented toward history and society across the years. That is the type that I refer to as historical nostalgia. The evidence shows that someone who experiences historical nostalgia might even have an emotional attachment to or longing for times in history that predate their own birth. That is very different from personal nostalgia. Personal nostalgia means that you are longing for or feeling good about aspects of your life that you already live through and have stored in your memory. My original data, in the beginning, demonstrated that individuals can be experiencing a lot of one type of the nostalgia and maybe not much of the other. They're relatively non-correlated or independent phenomena. They're not the same thing. Luna: Your research has shown that nostalgia can be a stabilizing force and comfort us during times of change and transition. Can you explain that a bit more? -- how far that person has come in life. In a way, Nostalgia is like a measurement. It's a way we keep track of things, we monitor progress through life, not just for ourselves, but even for other people to whom we are very attached. -- today's political climate where many people are longing to return to "the good old days" in the United States. What does this say to you as a nostalgia researcher? Batcho: It tells me a couple of things. First of all, different people -- reasons. Let's say, someone who is old enough to have lived through, for example, the 1950s, they might actually be experiencing some personal nostalgia because they're remembering how they and their family celebrated holidays, or what it was like going to school in the mid-1950s. That phenomenon would be very, very different for a younger person, for example, a member of the millennial generation. For them, it's not personal nostalgia, it's historical. Historical nostalgia, in my research, suggests is more likely triggered by dissatisfaction with the present. -- way, this is a two-edged sword because just as we can idealize and romanticize and therefore distort the accuracy of memories, we can go in the other direction. One of the reasons I find nostalgia so fascinating is because I have an interest in connecting the theoretical research in the laboratory to people's lived experiences because of -- nostalgic they would be then for those days? The answer to that is much more complicated than I thought it would be. I thought that those individuals would have the least amount of nostalgia. It turns out that it probably depends upon two things. -- didn't have enough to eat? Do you remember when somebody was unkind to us?" That person is an influence on our memory retrieval processes and we're more likely then to experience nostalgia in a negative way. On the other hand, if you're hanging out with people who are laughing about the funny times and the times when something embarrassing -- is missing might be this social connectedness up close and personal. On the other hand, it might be that people are losing track of their sense of purpose and meaning and the nostalgia, one of its healthiest functions is to keep us on track with regard to the meaningfulness of our lives. Data suggests that nostalgia facilitates our understanding of meaning in life and so in a way when we look at all the reboots and people going back to the past, it might be telling us that people aren't 100% -- while. I don't think it's going to continue on unabated, however. Luna: Is there some element of infectiousness to nostalgia? I mean, we talked about obviously people have more access to seeing these things online and they can share it, but even people, if they're physically -- broaden it out a little more. Luna: Can this nostalgia be a destructive force that can really incubate anger, isolation or hatred? It seems like it could have that potential Batcho: Most of the research suggests that nostalgia is aligned with or correlated with very soft, pro-social emotions such as compassion, empathy, altruism. It's unlikely, generally, to be associated with -- they were among, were not able to share that. What leads ultimately to a healthy kind of nostalgia is the one where the positive pro-social aspects of nostalgia can reconnect us now. Not just to people in our past but to the people we're dealing with today. That is possible, that can happen. All the memoirs that I've studied, -- The other aspect of this is that some people are looking at what they might refer to as social nostalgia and looking at groups and having designs where they're comparing intra-group versus inter-group. In those situations, you're perhaps talking about a slightly different phenomenon. Luna: Can nostalgia hold us back by keeping us dwelling on the past? Can it really impede what is happening in the current moment and in the future? -- I've thought a great deal about this and most of the research I've covered it looks like this. Nostalgia is bittersweet. Why did it evolve that way? If you take a social evolutionary perspective, it would make perfect sense that we would want to revisit our past so that we always -- that they're undergoing a very intolerable current situation in their life and they might seek counseling to help them deal with that because they're using nostalgia then or their memories as an escape. For the most part, most people my research shows, because nostalgia is a social emotion it is actually correlated with or associated with healthy coping mechanisms such as seeking out others when they're having -- we're experiencing today so it's generally healthy. Luna: How does age affect a person's feelings of nostalgia? Is it across the board or is it older or younger people? Batcho: My original data set suggested that there is a bump in nostalgia where it peaks not in old age as many theorists would have expected but peaks in young adulthood. Most theorists argue that the reason for that increase in nostalgia during young adulthood is because it's such a pivotal developmental transitional period. It is literally the time when a person has one foot still back in their childhood and -- on because there's a bit over reluctance out of trepidation. Will my future be as wonderful and as rosy as my past was? We know that transitional periods including developmental ones trigger nostalgia. Some newer research is suggesting that there might be a smaller but -- nostalgic. Luna: Do you think nostalgia has always been a part of the human experience? Batcho: When I first did literature review in order to put together my nostalgia inventory, I was really impressed to find references to nostalgia before it ever had the name nostalgia and those references go back thousands of years. You can find in literature all kinds of examples of people who were in some sense nostalgic for sometimes their -- Luna: That's really fascinating. Also can you just-- Now you've touched on it a few times, can you explain your nostalgia inventory and how you use it in your research? Batcho: Yes, because I define nostalgia as a longing for or missing for one's personal past, I comprised it of items that asked people to what extent they missed something from their past. Some of the items on the -- One which is a more concrete set of things that we miss from our past and the other being a little more abstract a little more conceptual and I argue that nostalgia is an umbrella that covers both of those. My inventory measures it in a way that connects people to missing their own past and that is not correlated with inventories that look at it -- explained that memories can be manipulated under the right conditions. What are your thoughts on that and how that can affect our levels of nostalgia about the past? Batcho: I agree. I agree completely. I think that to some extent, how -- nostalgic memories either of that relationship and saying, gee, how did we come to this unhappiness when we were so passionately in love in the beginning? There are researchers now looking at relationship nostalgia. It can be helpful to some extent but on the other hand, if you're using it as a way of almost arguing that you want out of the relationship. -- Luna: Just to wrap this up for our listeners. We've touched on a lot of different areas of nostalgia. I want to know, is there a way for society to collectively use nostalgia to better itself? How can we tangibly benefit from it? Batcho: I think it's really a very important resource and it's underutilized. I say that even though we have all these spin-offs and reboots and we have a lot of nostalgia. If you use a search engine for the term nostalgia, it is incredible. You can find maybe near 300 million hits on that search engine but just because you have a lot of something doesn't mean that you're using it effectively. We could start -- parenting. One of the healthiest forms of nostalgia throughout human history has always been to connect each generation to the next. In that sort of bond, you pass down to the next generation, the best of the past. Just -- bond so that we can get along with one another better than perhaps some people think we're getting along with one another today. Because differences can be divisive, nostalgia could be in a way part of the cure because nostalgia does the opposite. Instead of dividing, it unites. Luna: There's a lot of great things that nostalgia can do for us if we just hone in on that and try to utilize it as you just mentioned. -- Download Episode Episode 93: Does Nostalgia Have a Psychological Purpose? Save the MP3 file linked above to listen to it on your computer or