Krystine Batcho, PhD
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.
Does nostalgia have a psychological purpose? With Krystine Batcho, PhD
Krystine Batcho, PhD, is an expert on nostalgia and developed the Nostalgia Inventory, a survey that assesses proneness to personal nostalgia.
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