Nostalgia Is Important for Social Connection and Self-Identity

Summertime often triggers nostalgic memories, such as a long-ago cross-country family vacation or songs sung at a summer camp from one's youth. When these memories spring to mind, they can overwhelm people with emotions and moments that are decades old, often involving friends and family members whom they will never see again.

Why do people experience nostalgia? Why do people sometimes become so preoccupied with past moments involving people that can never be relived again? Recent research has begun to shed light on nostalgia, and this work identifies its importance for understanding ourselves and our connections with others.

The past matters for understanding our present and future

Of the many emotions that people experience, nostalgia is as interesting as it is complex. Nostalgia is an ambivalent emotion involving sentimental longing for a past that no longer exists. Although this fondness for the past feels mostly positive, it also involves a yearning for things that no longer can be, adding sadness to one's emotional canvas.

People often are nostalgic for childhood memories with family

Source: Allen R McConnell

Whether it is digging through one's high school yearbooks looking at classmates long-since forgotten, remembering the musty smell of a grandparent's attic from childhood visits, or chatting about one's favorite videogames from one's youth with friends, it is striking how much of our time can be consumed by thinking about days of yore. Indeed, one might argue that people should not "waste their time" dwelling on the unretrievable past when they could focus on events, people, and experiences that can still take place in the present or that may take place in the future.

However, research shows that nostalgia serves many important functions for people. For example, Wildschut et al. (2006) found that people often experience nostalgia in response to negative life events or to feeling lonely, and reflecting on one's past improves people's mood even though those past experiences are no longer available to them. Further, these scholars found that people who were asked to be nostalgic showed improved mood and self-esteem, further demonstrating how nostalgia elevates people's self-worth.

Part of the power of nostalgia is not just that it encourages people to reflect on positive past experiences but also that people's wistfulness reminds them of important moments and important connections to others (Wildschut et al., 2006). In fact, this link between nostalgia and social connectedness is so strong that inducing people to feel nostalgia increases their desire to help others, presumably to establish deeper social bonds. Specifically, people who were exposed to nostalgic charity appeals were more inclined to donate money to the charity than people who received similar appeals that did not feature connections to the past (Zhou et al., 2012).

In addition to enriching people's connections to others, nostalgia serves to strengthen people's feelings toward nostalgic objects. For example, feeling nostalgic about a childhood memory of watching a classic movie like "101 Dalmatians" in a cinema with one's family not only underscores one's connectedness to family, but it also may result in especially strong and positive attitudes toward that movie. Indeed, research by Togans and McConnell (2024) found that people who reflected upon a nostalgic song or television program viewed those nostalgic media items as greater in positivity and in importance. Moreover, as people reported stronger feelings of nostalgia toward those media items, they viewed them as more self-defining (i.e., more telling of who they are as a person). Thus, it seems that people use nostalgia in constructing their sense of who they are, dwelling on particular past episodes frequently in a way that helps to cement these moments and connections in defining who they are (see also, Sedikides et al., 2022)

In sum, it should not be surprising that people experience nostalgia during the summertime. For those who find their minds wandering wistfully to past adventures, people, and events, this time dwelling on events that will never come again is certainly useful for improving one's mood and for reminding them about the people and experiences contributing to their journey to who they have become today.

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