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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
Krystine Batcho, PhD Krystine Batcho, PhD, is a professor of psychology
at LeMoyne College and a licensed psychologist. She makes regular
contributions as an expert on the Psychology Today website. Her
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
have been widely cited, and she is frequently interviewed by the media
on topics of current interest, including the impact of social media.
She teaches courses in cognitive psychology, learning, and decision
making and mentors student research.
Streaming Audio
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Transcript
Kaitlin Luna: Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology , a biweekly
podcast from the American Psychological Association that explores the
connections between psychological science and everyday life. I'm your
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 to who we feel we are today.
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
very young, it's part of what bonds us to the most important people in
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.
The other way that it's unifying is that it helps us to unify what
otherwise would be felt or experienced by us as conflicts. In itself,
it is somewhat of a conflict because as I define it is a bitter-sweet
emotion. It's sweet because we're remembering the best times, the good
times of our life. The bitterness comes from the sense that we know for
sure that we can never really regain them, they're gone forever. The
irreversibility of time means that we absolutely cannot go back in time
so it helps us to deal with the conflict of the bitter longing for what
can never be again together with the sweetness of having experienced it
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?
Batcho: Yes, change whether it's good change or negative change. We
know that it's stressful. It's very difficult to grasp change, because
in some sense, at a very deep psychic level, change threatens us. It's
a little frightening because we're not 100% sure that we can control
it. One of the most important aspects of being a healthy human being is
having a sense that you are in control of things. When things start to
change, either very substantially, such as major events in a person's
life, getting married or getting divorced, getting a new career, going
back to school or graduating from school, it's comforting to have a
nostalgic feeling for the past that reminds us that although we don't
know what the future is going to bring, what we do know is that we know
who we have been and who we really are.
It's a very comforting emotion. It also brings back; it stimulates
memories of the times when we were accepted and loved unconditionally.
That is such a powerfully comforting phenomenon, knowing that there was
a time in life when we didn't have to earn our love, or we didn't
deserve it because we earned a certain amount of money or we were
successful in a certain venue. Our parents, for example, or our
siblings or our friends simply loved us unconditionally. That is a
wonderfully comforting feeling when we're undergoing any kind of
turmoil in our personal lives.
Luna: When you're going through a difficult experience or a new change,
as you mentioned, you might find yourself thinking a lot about memories
from the past, is that correct to say?
Batcho: Absolutely. For instance, many people will tell you that if
they're at a major event, graduation, a wedding, christening for a
baby, very often what is happening is they have an entire flood of
their mind with all the nostalgic memories that come to be relevant to
this situation. When a parent is sitting in the audience, and they
watch their child graduate, they cannot help but remember when that
child was little and needed help putting their shoes on and thinking
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.
Luna: I want to flip that on the other side a bit and talk about
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
have that kind of sense of wishing for the good old days for different
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.
If people are unhappy for any reason with how things are today, they're
more likely then to experience this sense that things must have been
better in the past. How far they have to go in terms of their longing
can depend upon how much they know about history. Some of this gets
handed down through stories from grandparents and some of it gets
handed down through films that people watch or even literature that
they've read. Someone could, for example, become enamored of a period
in history such as Victorian days, not because they've lived through
them, obviously, but because they have become romanticized and
idealized in a way in literature and in film.
That kind of phenomenon is very, very different from someone who says,
I think that today is a very stressful time, and when I was growing up,
I think it was less stressful. The reason for that is because our
memories are not faithful. They're not accurate to what things really
were like. They're our impressions of what things were like in the
past.
Luna: You want to expand on a little bit more. Do you think people are
remembering the, quote, good old days accurately because a lot of you
might say your life is worse, and this is the United States speaking
of, it's worse than it was 60 years ago, in the 1950s are glamorizes
being this ideal moment in time probably immortalized in a show like
Leave It to Beaver or something like that. When you think about that,
the experience of the 1950s of some people in America was probably
wonderful, but the experience of other people at that time was probably
terrible.
I'm thinking were white Americans experienced 1950s in one way. People
of color experienced it in a totally different way. Women experienced
it in one way, men experience another. Can you talk a little bit more
about that like are we overly romanticizing that period of time in this
country today?
Batcho: That is an excellent question. We have decades of cognitive
research that show that the general default is that memories are not
accurate, and that's true for all kinds of memories. When we think
about retrieving memories, for example, if we want to retrieve what do
we remember about the 1950s or whatever period in history that we've
lived through, we can be very selective. When you think about a time
period in society, it has so many components to it. One individual
might be nostalgic for that time, but they're not thinking about things
like racism or discrimination or even conflict. For example, the baby
boomers, some of them were hippies during the 1960s, and when they get
nostalgic for Woodstock, they might not be really thinking about the
anti-war protests and some of the violence that occurred at that time.
They're selecting out the parts of that. They might be thinking about,
oh, I had wonderful friendships then or they might be thinking about
some of their early romantic relationships.
We pick and choose. The memory process not only is selective, but it
also distorts to some extent. We do idealize things on occasion. By the
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
clinical applications.
Some people find that their memories tend to go the other direction
when they're remembering the past. They're always thinking of the
negative aspects. Then they might distort that and say, "Oh, as a
child, my parents didn't love me. They didn't give me toys. They were
very mean to me. My friends bullied me," but actually, if we had a
videotape of their childhoods, we might find that that's not
necessarily totally accurate. Their childhood might not have been any
different from their siblings' childhood. That makes us ask a question.
Then why are some individuals selectively romanticizing the past
whereas others are actually exaggerating its negative aspects?
That led me in the early research that I did to look at generations to
some extent. I was interested in looking at the greatest generation,
many of whom grew up as children during the Great Depression. I
interviewed people who had experienced quite a bit of financial
hardship. When they talked about their memories of their childhood,
they, in fact, did talk about only being able to eat bread on many
days. That idea that they recognize that their childhood was one of
deprivation, one of hardship, you might say, does that factor into how
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.
One is an individual's personality or their psychological well-being in
the first place. If you have two individuals one of whom is really
happy in their current life and they're emotionally doing just fine.
They might go back and remember bad things and then laugh about them
and say wow we've come a long way since those days haven't, we. Now we
have a big Thanksgiving feast and we have all this food. I remember
being six years old not having enough to eat. Whereas someone else who
is suffering from something like depression or an anxiety disorder.
They might go back and think about the past and then let that further
sadden them rather than make them happy by comparison with how far
they've come.
Luna: That's really fascinating. One thing I do my touch a little bit
more to like, why do we remember something so positively something so
negatively? Because you say it might depend on the person's mental
state, how they're doing in life. It's just so fascinating how we can
look back on an experience and say, even if it was bad you can go back
and look at an experience and focus on the positive aspects of it.
Batcho: Yes, exactly. That is fascinating. I think that there are at
least two levels at which you can ask that question. One level is when
someone is sitting in private just reminiscing. There it is very
important to think about their current mood state. Because we have mood
dependent memory effects. When you're sad, you're more likely to think
of sad memories. When you're happy, you're more likely to think of
happy memories. On the other level, we have a social element and
establish it is a social experience. If you're hanging out with friends
and reminiscing about the days back in high school or college or
whatever. Now, depending upon what your friends say in that social
setting that might trigger you to either be more positive or more
negative. In a way, one really good piece of advice is for people who
are starting to feel stressed out or lonely, or sad.
It's very important to try to gravitate toward people who stimulate the
best of what you can bring to today from your past. In other words, if
someone is always bringing you down by saying, "Do you remember when we
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
happened, everyone loves to share their most embarrassing moment. In
that social setting when it's jovial and people are feeling good about
it and finding the lessons learned from it. Now, that might bring out
the best of nostalgic memory.
Luna: It's interesting that a lot of it is dependent upon humans around
you. That's really interesting.
Batcho: Yes, it is. I think it's of great importance today because some
of the current survey data have suggested that especially for the
millennial generation and other adults, there is a great deal of
reported loneliness. Some people suspect that has a little bit to do,
not entirely but a little bit to do with the Internet or cyberspace and
social media. The argument is there are 24 hours in a day. How do you
spend those hours? People who grew up before the Internet their days
were spent largely either alone or with other people face to face.
That's no longer the case. We have an incredible amount of time spent
in cyberspace. Even when you're connecting to other people in a social
way, you're connecting to them at a distance. I believe that the
psychological distancing can make people feel lonelier than they would
have felt had they spent exactly the same amount of time having a cup
of coffee with that person face to face. I think that the social
element needs to be explored and researched even more heavily given the
great proportion of time that young adults are spending, not in actual
face to face, but in virtual reality.
Luna: Yes. There's so many throwbacks, if you will, happening today
like I'm talking about the TV shows that are being rebooted or were
popular in the '90s bands from long ago have reunited and are going out
on tour. There's places like Buzzfeed often feature, top 20 lists like
top 20 toys from the 1980s that sort of thing. People really flock to
that and want to share their memories of certain toy. I was wondering
from your perspective, what that tells us about people today. Is it
really because of we're hyper-connected all the time or could it be
people are more nostalgic today is that we have access to sharing these
memories with a lot of people all at once through the internet?
Batcho: That is a complicated question and I think there are several
reasons for the retro-phenomenon that has become somewhat of a fad. I
think on one level it tells us based upon the research that there's
something people feel is missing in the current lifestyle and that what
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%
satisfied with the current lifestyle. There's something that might be
missing on a much more pragmatic, lower level. You might argue that a
lot of this is because we can suddenly, it has become so accessible
with social media. All it takes is for one person to post something
from the past and raise a question. Judy, do you remember watching this
old TV show or I wonder whatever happened to and before. What, it can
go viral and we have the technology now to really immerse people in
these reboots and then spin-offs, et cetera.
Until it stops making profit, I think we're going to see this for a
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
together, does it become something that spreads from one person to the
other?
Batcho: I believe it can be actually. I wish it were more infectious.
I'll tell you what I mean by that. I think is infectious when you have
a group of people who have some shared experience. The best example of
that are when a group of friends are reminiscing about their antics,
the things they did as either teenagers or children or what have you.
There it's a bonding experience. Another example of that is we know
from current research that sports fans love to do that. They talk about
the games that they enjoyed and when their team was victorious. When
you have a common bond, it can be very infectious and it's like a
domino one memory triggers another.
The reason why I say I wish it were more infectious is because that can
break down when you have a group of people who do not have shared
experiences to be nostalgic about. Suddenly if you have one individual
wanting to reminisce about his or her own past experiences, but no one
else in that group remembers those things or lived through those
things. In, a long time ago people talked about generation gaps.
Someone is talking about the 1950s a millennial says, Oh, I don't even
know what you're talking about. I don't know that TV show.
I never saw that this can actually alienate other people because people
don't necessarily want to hear about your nostalgic memories. They want
to share their own. That's why I say I wish it were a little more open
because we have so much to learn from one another's nostalgic memories.
That's why I encourage people when they find themselves in a situation
such as you're reminiscing about your past and other people start
drifting away because they're bored, you might start asking them about
theirs and start a conversation, a dialogue. In that sense, you can
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
hostility or anger. Can it be isolating? That's a very interesting
question because you could argue that if you find yourself, the victim
of or a survivor of very unique circumstances and now you're nostalgic
for a time before that, other people might not be able to relate to
you. You might or might not have the motivation to leave your past
behind.
That led me to doing the qualitative analysis of memoirs of people, who
had survived under wartime conditions. What's particularly interesting
to me is that, when those individuals recount how they had to adapt to
significant change. In some cases became relocated, not by their own
choice but because of conditions of war. They became, for example,
refugees or they had to emigrate. Initially, in the early stages, they
almost had a psychic block against accepting a new culture, a new life.
They almost wallowed in their nostalgic memories of the past and found
as time went on that that became very isolating. Because the people
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,
have demonstrated how that happens. It happens by confronting the past
with the current situation in trying to find what were the lessons we
learned from our past that we can now tweak, update, customize and use
to cope with the turmoil and the conflict in the change that we've gone
through to sort of be more optimistic towards the future.
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?
Batcho: When I began collecting data, that was the prevailing belief
among theorists. Before people started collecting empirical evidence,
it was just assumed. In fact, much of the psychoanalytic thought that
predated behaviorism and modern or contemporary social science argued
that it would be regressive try to revisit your past. That the danger
was that if your past is better than your present, why would you not
just then stay there? Well, once I began collecting data and then other
people, of course, have extended this even worldwide, what we find is
that generally speaking, that is not what happens.
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
learn from it. At the same time, we don't want to stay in the past. The
sweetness entices us to revisit our past. Once we're there, the
bitterness of knowing that actually it no longer exists reminds us that
we must return to the present. That makes us want to return to the
present.
My argument is that it's almost never, at least the research suggests
it would be extremely unlikely for someone to want to remain in the
past. If someone found themselves being trapped in the past, that
suggests that they're experiencing some sort of difficulty. It could be
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
difficulties. We, in fact, when we revisit our memories, we try to
remember how other people in our lives solved problems in the past and
then use that as a role model for how we want to solve the problems
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
one foot anticipating their move into complete adult independence.
While they have a little bit of their identity still aligned with or
connected to their past, they are eager to forge ahead and for that
reason, there is a lot more frequency of nostalgic reminiscence going
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
another bump in older individuals and that is because they're watching
a significant change in their own lifestyle from when they were for
example in terms of physical well-being or physical health completely
in the prime of their health versus looking ahead toward aging as well
I might not be able to be as active as I once had been or maybe they're
suffering with physical conditions or disorders that limit some of
their lifestyles. For that reason, they would also become more
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
home or their homeland and that fits the original definition of it as
homesickness but also in terms of longing for the past and therefore
the argument is that it's universal. It probably is part of the human
experience, so it's always been there as a potential. It cuts across
all cultures and all historical time periods.
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
inventory are really conceptual or abstract such as missing the
innocence of childhood or missing the freedom from having
responsibilities. Others are more concrete missing your toys, missing
pets that you had in your former days and it turns out that there
really are probably two factors within it.
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
more as a historical type of experience or social event.
Luna: I might also go back to where we're talking a little bit more
about the memories, how they can be both positive and negative.
Batcho: Yes.
Luna: In a previous episode, we did Episode 91 how memory can be
manipulated. We featured memory expert, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus. She
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
we interpret our past, how we comprehend, can change. We can have
retrospective comprehension or interpretation of our memories. That
depends upon what purpose we're trying to serve in our present. If
someone is trying to find a reason to feel loved or worthy of love,
then they might have a guided sense through their own historic memories
of looking for the times when they were loved. Maybe even doing an
analysis of. I wonder if something went wrong or was I partly
responsible or two, I just have bad luck?
A good example of that would be if someone is undergoing a breakup of
an important relationship. Now, they might be motivated to have
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.
You say, "Well, the reason why I am leaving this relationship is
because when I compare my satisfaction with it today, with how much joy
I got out of it in the beginning, I see that it's been all downhill."
I'm arguing here that our motivations can actually influence how we
remember the past and how we interpret the meaningfulness of our past.
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
to incorporate it more effectively, I believe. Not just in media,
that's one great vehicle. We can also look at how we can use it in
social media, in cyberspace, but also in education and perhaps in
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
because we are oriented toward progress, doesn't mean that there isn't
something of value that we might have forgotten from the past. A good
example of that would be to say that all the technology that has been
developed recently, is absolutely wonderful. All the progress in
medicine has saved so many lives. We are almost obsessed with
future-oriented progress. The only risk that brings us is the risk of
wondering whether we've made certain trade-offs.
Are there things that were present before that were either not doing as
effectively today? For example, are we helping young children develop
empathy for others and empathy for those who are different from
themselves as effectively as we might? There are many possible
practical tools. It used to be that when parents had children, they
relive their own nostalgic memories by reading children's books that
they had read to them to their own children. Then when they became
grandparents doing the same for their grandchildren, because the
millennials have delayed marriage and children and family size has
shrunk, we might be having a little bit of a deficit in those kinds of
intergenerational transmissions.
I think that we can learn a lot from that and wonder how we can now
tweak that replicate it today so that we don't just look across
generations, but we look across cultures. We look across differences of
opinion and diverse ideologies. So, what can we find that is a common
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.
Batcho: Yes, absolutely.
Luna: Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Batcho. We really
appreciate your time. It has been a really very interesting topic. I
think our listeners will really enjoy.
Batcho: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it myself.
Luna: Before we go, I want to remind you that we want to hear from you.
You can e-mail your comments and ideas to speakingofpsychology@apa.org.
That's speaking of psychology all one-word dot org. Please consider
giving us a rating in iTunes, it really helps. Speaking of Psychology
is part of the APA podcast network which includes other informative
podcasts like APA Journals Dialogue about new psychological research
and Progress Notes about the practice of psychology. You can find all
of our podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also go to our website SpeakingofPsychology.org to listen to
more episodes. I'm Kaitlin Luna with the American Psychological
Association.
Date created: November 2019
Speaking of Psychology
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Episode 93: Does Nostalgia Have a Psychological Purpose?
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About the host: Kaitlin Luna
Kaitlin Luna was the host of Speaking of Psychology from September 2018
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