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Look đź”™ in Fondness: Behavioural Lens on Nostalgia đź“«

Look đź”™ in Fondness: Behavioural Lens on Nostalgia đź“«

It was Hofer a young Swiss physician who coined the term nostalgia in 1688. Coined it and promptly diagnosed it as being similar to paranoia, except the sufferer was mad with longing. However, his work was considered key work in psychological, and psychosomatic science for two key reasons:

  1. Nostalgia was described as a clinical condition.
  2. His work gave credence to mind over body, which was novel.

Now for the last decade the evidence is overwhelmingly on the side of nostalgics and it is considered a largely positive not negative emotion. Also it is a huge industry, your nostalgia will be powering the avant garde of art, culture, and craft. Just check what the boomers did to The Rolling Stones, and AC/DC, they are great bands but the last few years have been largely driven by a fondness for the youth, so much so that there is a new form of consuming rock which is a derivative of what is described as neo-nostalgia.

What makes nostalgia an interesting behavioural phenomena is that it is universal, the themes recurring in nostalgia in India, can also be same in Portugal. The context changes, one can listen to a Fado song and a similar Mando song and there will be the same theme but the context will be slightly different.

A 1778 print shows four Swiss mercenaries—some of the earliest subjects of medical reports on nostalgia—at rest during a moment of calm. (Source: National Geographic/Swiss Museum)

Does Nostalgia Have a Psychological Purpose?

From The APA Podcast, featuring Professor Krystine Batcho. The following is her answer on role of nostalgia in the human psyche, do click on the link to read, or hear the full podcast.

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.

Nostalgia: What Marketers Know?

Marketers know a lot about human behaviour and they discovered the power of nostalgia as a marketing tool in early 1980's. The work was started during the second world war by McCann, Holbrook & Schindler expanded on the work in a consumption setting using musical tastes as a proxy. Marketers understood the transitional state of life brought out the nostalgic state in many of us, for example in 1990's the messages were focused on good old days of 1950's and 1960's.

Today a lot of the focus is on targeting young demographic growing up in 90's & 00's, therefore a lot of FRIENDS, and Harry Potter reunions, maybe?

The Political Role of Nostalgia

Nostalgia plays a very important role in politics. Donald Trump has left office but his spectre continues to haunt the American political scene. The instigators of January 6th riot at The Capitol were members of the alt-right. The American alt-right has made a clarion call out of the past, a great example is the use of the year of American independence as some long lost utopia of independence and natural rights. The great myth of 1776 has not stopped the creation of such politically expedient wedges in sand. In fact the process has only gained traction from Turkey, to the United Kingdom.

This cultural trope of not having any novel, transformative ideas is very close to the argument New York Times columnist Ross Douthat makes in his 2020 book, The Decadent Society. According to Douthat, the US — and really the entire Western world — is stuck in a kind of cultural doom loop. In many ways, Douthat says, we've become victims of our own success and are now locked in a state of malaise, in which our culture and politics feel exhausted.

Douthat's definition of a “decadent society” is that we're trapped in a stale system that keeps spinning in place, reproducing the same arguments and frustrations over and over again. Trump's election is simultaneously a sign that a lot of people were desperate for something different and a reflection of the shallow and frivolous culture that spawned him.

Reflecting on political nostalgia Svetlana Boym characterises “it as a defence mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals”. The value of nostalgia as a political tool lies in engendering a realistic, and critical view of the past, this binary nature allows it to inform both progressive, and reactionary politics.

The Lab Working on Nostalgia

The Emotion Lab based in the Queen Mary University of London launched in 2019 works on designing interactive products, courses to understand emotions and how we respond to them. It is part of Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. Since 2008 the centre has been creating an interdisciplinary study and popular knowledge products focused on emotions.

They have an interesting card game that you might enjoy.


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