![]() It helps to decrease the negative feelings of being alone. ![]() It is interesting because then the nostalgia helps someone feel connected again. Nostalgia is almost like a psychological substitute for the real thing, if you think about the song, "I'll Be Home for Christmas," that is almost the quintessential holiday nostalgia that helps to re-unite us across time and space.įor the same reason, if you think about someone who lost a loved one during the year or around the holiday season, now they can no longer physically re-unite with the deceased loved one, but nostalgia once again becomes a psychological substitute, and all of those good memories that revolve around the time spent with the person really help us to cope with loss.įor one thing, loneliness has been shown to be a trigger for heightened nostalgia. So in a way, holidays bring together people when they cannot be together. People want to travel home to be with relatives, people are more inclined to participate in religious traditions or cultural customs. Now move onto the question, as you can tell everyone from advertising to marketing to religion, everything about the holidays centers around relationships. That is one of the primary benefits of personal nostalgia. In other words, we define ourselves in terms of our relationships, in terms of how we are connected to other people, that helps us identify our sense of self, and nostalgia helps us maintain those connections and a sense of belonging. They can do that in a number of important ways, we have been talking about continuity or grounding, one of the ways individuals ground themselves is in terms of who they are relative to other people. Why do the holidays in particular tend to evoke nostalgia? There is really a psychological assault on that sense of identity at that time - some people go off to college, some start their jobs, some get married, so there are a lot of significant changes, and it seems that nostalgia peaks around that time as a reaction to all the shifts, to all the transition. Right now, the consensus appears to be that the peak years for nostalgia might actually be early adulthood and the reason for that has to do with change and transition, because early adulthood is a very important psychological and developmental state where individuals figure out who they want to be. That sense of nostalgia helps to link you to your own personal past it helps you remember who you have been. ![]() From the time you are born, and as you go through life, there are so many changes, there are too many to even mention.Īt a certain point, if there is something traumatic that occurs, a crisis, it could be anything from going off to war, immigration, a death in the family, whenever there is a major change it can be very helpful to kind of keep grounded in the sense of who you are. You might refer to that as sense of self or understanding of one's identity. It seems to help people maintain a constant sense of who they are. Your research has shown benefits associated with nostalgia. If we're talking about a 12 year old, a 12 year old might be nostalgic for toys he or she had as a toddler. It’s fair to say that, as a mood state, almost everyone would agree today that it is universal, it cuts across cultures, it cuts across historical periods, it even cuts across the developmental stages or across the age span.Įven a child can be nostalgic. To some extent what confused the research in this area is that some people are talking about it as a personality trait - more nostalgic or less nostalgic individuals - and other people are talking about it as a transient mood state - for example, "I feel more nostalgic around the holidays." You can define it either way. ![]() You might feel nostalgia for your childhood or your teen years. ![]() The second type is the type most people have been researching and we refer to it mostly as personal nostalgia, and as you might suspect from the name, it means someone misses or feels emotions toward the past they themselves lived through, you might call it the autobiographical past. If I said I feel nostalgia for or feel attracted to the Victorian time period, that would be an example of historical nostalgia. That kind of nostalgia refers to feeling good sentiments or feeling attracted to times in the past when the individual might not even have been alive yet. Today theorists make an important distinction between two different types of nostalgia, historical and personal. Both are considered psychological entities and both are viewed as emotional states. ![]()
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