How nostalgia infuses life with meaning: From social connectedness to self‐continuity

By Wijnand Adriaan Pieter Van Tilburg, Constantine Sedikides, T. Wildschut, Ad Vingerhoets. European Journal of Social Psychology, 2018

107 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Nostalgia increases meaning in life (MIL), but how so? In four experiments-using varied operationalizations of nostalgia, diverse populations, and complementary methodologies-we identified a serial process. We hypothesized and found, in Experiment 1, that self-continuity boosts MIL. We hypothesized and found, in Experiment 2, that nostalgia increases MIL through self-continuity. Finally, we hypothesized and found, in Experiments 3-4, that nostalgia fosters social connectedness, which plausibly heightens self-continuity, which in turn strengthens MIL. The findings clarify an intricate pathway through which nostalgia renders life more meaningful.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Literature and Literary Theory, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4a734709626139510369160b493ec57d45e82e3a

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Citations in the corpus

The sociality of personal and collective nostalgia (2019, background): “In a follow-up study (Van Tilburg et al., 2018, Study 5), 52 online participants recalled four personally important events, described them, and rated the extent to which each event led them to experience the 11 emotions.”