Anastasia PlatoffSeminar in Social PsychologyFall 2011Ron Cohen

Illuminating the Aura of Nostalgia: Perceptions of Time, Place, and Identity

The present investigation is formulated, in part, on the presupposition that one’s perception

of self continuity is the core of personal identity, and that this sense of temporal coherence is

experienced diachronically and is thus largely dependent on memory (Davis, 1979; Kandel,

2006; Lampinen et al., 2004; Sedikides et al., 2008; James 1890/1950). Nostalgia fits within this

framework as a transient cognitive and affective state that involves remembrance of vivid,

emotionally-laden memories from one’s history; it is a way to bring the past and present into a

mental landscape that is exempt from concerns of time. The aim of this research is to analyze

nostalgia as both a universal and particular experience, and to subsequently explore the potential

functions of nostalgia as they relate to perceptions of self continuity over time. The meaning one

ascribes to any given experience of nostalgia will be idiosyncratic, but a careful investigation of

what characterizes nostalgia as a sensory and cognitive, albeit elusive, phenomenon will help to

clarify its inclusive implications for self continuity.

Historical Perceptions of Nostalgia

There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief — Aeschylus

The concept of nostalgia has weathered a long history of theoretical dispute, regarding both

its definitional and psychological implications. Nostalgia is a universal experience, but because

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its affective impact is often marked by feelings of ambivalence, the phenomenon has always

been difficult to analyze in concrete terms. The word “nostalgia” is of Greek origin; a hybrid

derived from the words nostos and algos—the former meaning “to return home,” the latter

meaning pain or suffering. Thus, nostalgia, by its literal definition, is the suffering caused by the

desire to return home (Sedikides et al., 2011). First introduced in 1688 by the Swiss physician,

Johannes Hofer, the term was used in a nosological sense to describe the condition of chronic

homesickness, particularly in soldiers. Thus, the first linguistic use of “nostalgia” had

connotations of mental disease. By the end of the eighteenth century, nostalgia had become well-

established in medical discourse as a contagious and potentially fatal condition, with a myriad of

somatic symptoms including: convulsions, a ‘funny’ empty feeling in the stomach, high blood

pressure, and a “lump in the throat” (Naqvi, 2007). The known remedy was repatriation, but

treatments for acute cases of nostalgia ranged from threatening a “red-hot iron to the abdomen”

to administering high doses of opium (Cointe, 1790; Larrey, 1888).

By World War II, the West had become immersed in the psychoanalytic field and an

additional etiology of nostalgia was born. Initially formulated under the name of “cryptic

nostalgia,” this form of nostalgia had manifest symptoms of inattention, excessive emotionality,

and disobedience—consequences of a man’s failure to renounce his infantile love for his mother.

(Fodor, 1950). The origin of the nostalgic affliction had evolved from a pathological yearning for

one’s home or nation during wartime to the unconscious “home” of one’s conception and

libidinal cathexis (i.e., the womb and the mother, respectively). In either case, the nostalgic

sufferer was distinguished by his anxious, childish behavior—the soldier was deemed a coward

or malingerer, the analysand a compulsive neurotic. The implication here was that “home,” the

focal point of nostalgia, was a fixed place in the past and that, in the course of normal

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development, this place is supposed to be abandoned. The presence of nostalgia, then, would

suggest that the process of maturation was incompletely executed—that there was a failure of

renunciation, and a failure to allow time to move forward.

As nostalgia continued to develop in the psychiatric domain, its disease connotations

experienced a concurrent decline. For example, Werman (1977) depicted the medical view of

nostalgia as obsolete, and instead attempted to clarify “normal” from “pathological” nostalgia,

drawing on the modest amount of psychiatric literature that had been published in the 1950’s and

1960’s. His first point of contention was the perennial use of nostalgia as a synonym for

homesickness—a comparison that reduced nostalgia to intense feelings of sadness and strange

behavior, and therefore neglected its nuanced cognitive and affective features. Werman also

emphasized that the ubiquity of the nostalgic experience indicates its normality, and that

pathology exists only when nostalgia has dominated all functions of the psyche. He then

addressed the unwarranted comparison between nostalgia and fantasy. The role of fantasy, in

psychoanalysis, is to revive an early experience of gratification that can substitute for the

fulfillment of a present, unconscious wish. By contrast, nostalgia calls forth a favorable past

experience, not as a substitute for a wish, but for itself. While both phenomena involve positive

remembrance, Werman notes that nostalgia does not necessitate a wish, for it is possible to

treasure a past experience without aching to return to it.

The epidemiological interest in nostalgia seems ephemeral in comparison to its perennial

and widespread existence as a literary theme. Before there was even a word for it, the motif of

nostalgia reverberated throughout Homer’s Odyssey—Odysseus, far from his wife and home in

Ithaca, is desperate to return. This perceived loss of centrality causes a deficit in his personal

solidarity. He grieves over this distance, but his memories nurture his vitality and serve as a

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coping agent in his punishing circumstances.

One of the most popular and evocative descriptions of personal nostalgia is the “episode of

the madeleine” in Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things

Past. In this illustration of involuntary memory, the narrator sits down for a cup of tea and petite

madeleines. He dips the cookie into his tea, brings it to his mouth, and his senses are flooded:

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me [my italics] ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray ... when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea. (Proust, 1913, p. 48)

This passage is exceptionally compelling in its illumination of a phenomenon that is

seldom experienced but always recognized. Whereas Odysseus willfully harnesses nostalgia as a

means to sustain himself, the narrator in this instance is reflexively triggered by a formerly

unconscious relic of his personal history. First, his sensory faculties are struck by some property;

a novel sensation, yet one that seems to embody his total person. Upon searching for its source, a

chapter from the past effortlessly relocates itself in the present, in the narrator’s conscious

memory. The taste of the madeleine brings with it a sense of temporal continuity—it is the same

madeleine now as it ever was and, accordingly, the narrator of the past and the narrator of the

present become ontologically united in a transient space where time appears to be immaterial.

There is a paradox in this meeting of selves. The memory of the madeleine is, like any

other memory, fixed in a particular episode of the temporal past (Trigg, 2007). However, this

memory seems capable of movement—it emerges from the unconscious and reveals itself in the

conscious mind; it migrates from the realm of the lost to that of the recovered. “Nostalgia

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maintains the centrality of a fixed point, against which time and memory revolve . . . the

convergence of homogeneous space, together with feel, sound, and smell of lost place, brings

about a moment of precarious equilibrium.” (Trigg, 2007). Trigg’s reasoning is embedded in the

metaphysical, but his ideas are relevant to both neurobiological and more practical

considerations of nostalgia and memory.

On an experiential level, the spontaneous recollection of a detailed and discrete memory,

such as that of the petite madeleine, is shocking to its human subject, and naturally sparks many

self-directed questions. The memory seems to surface automatically, but the interpretation is

dependent on the conscious subject. Given the sensory excitation and the new-yet-familiar

quality of the memory, its retrieval and content are recognized as personally important—that is,

it has self-referential implications. Thus, it would be understandable if the subject distinguished

this past episode as a salient feature in his diachronic identity, and subsequently included it in

what William James would deem the aggregate of the pronoun“I”—for why would it have been

resurrected with such affective potency if it were not essential to the person? The narrator lived

this past, and this past is still in him; he can see himself in this place, just as he can see himself in

the present.

The discursive history of nostalgia is not limited to its prominence as a disease entity and a

literary concept—since the 1970’s, nostalgia has become influential in the fields of sociology

and consumer research. In terms of the latter, studies have consistently revealed the advantages

of deploying “the nostalgic experience” as marketing and advertising tool (Holbrook &

Schindler, 1989). In the marketplace, nostalgia may be conveyed either through implicit or

explicit references to a past era that the target consumers have experienced, or through

advertisements featuring “nostalgia-based” products or stimuli (Havlena & Hovak, 1991). The

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success of the nostalgia enterprise would suggest that people are looking to return to a past that

seems more ideal than the present. Vintage and “retro”-style clothing; songs and images

evocative of a specific time or place; products claimed to have been made in an authentic,

ancestral tradition—these are examples of objects attractive to a past-oriented public. Empirical

laboratory research has helped consumer research in this way; since sociologists have begun to

study common aspects of nostalgic reverie in people of a certain age, life stage, and generation,

advertising executives have been able to cash in on the public’s current appetite.

For example, Batcho (1995) found that nostalgia has a general age pattern, with

adolescents/young adults (ages 18 to 21) as the group that willingly engages in nostalgia most

frequently. The results of this study revealed common targets of these young adults’ nostalgia,

including: not knowing sad or evil things; not having to worry; having someone to depend on;

home; heroes; friends; and the way people were. From a developmental perspective, these

individuals represent the fifth of Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial development—“Identity

vs. Role Confusion” (Erikson, 1963). Under the pressure to choose one’s roles in society,

commit to a lasting ideology, and ultimately foster a stable sense of identity, the inclination

toward nostalgia is likely relentless. Additionally, the physical relocation to a college campus or

new residence challenges many young adults’ perceptions of self continuity. These

developmental upheavals give the past a new tenor of meaning: for the adolescent, it is the stage

before things became complicated and before s/he was confronted with the awareness that things

could become complicated. Continuous threads of life’s simplicity then become symbols of

comfort. Earlier this year, the Nickelodeon television network announced their decision to re-

broadcast the beloved shows that young adults were devoted to as children in the 1990’s—this is

a prime example of a practical business exploitation of adolescents’ unending search for halcyon

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days.

Contemporary Research on Nostalgia

The most dramatic change in the discourse on nostalgia has been the recent social

psychological research that collectively attests to its multiplicity of psychological benefits. For

nearly two centuries, nostalgia was classified as maladaptive. However, within the last ten years,

a profusion of studies have reported that nostalgia may act as a buffer or coping device for

various stressors in life. For example, nostalgia has recently been claimed to: counteract

loneliness (Zhou et al., 2010), enable self continuity (Milligan, 2003; Sedikides et al., 2008;

Davis, 1979), aid the process of individuation (Batcho et al., 2008), function as an existential

resource (Routledge et al., 2011; Sedikides et al., 2004), reinstate meaning in one’s life

(Wildschut et al., 2006), and serve as a repository of social connectedness (Wildschut et al.,

2009).

In these cases, nostalgia is said to play the role of a mediator between a desired past and

unfavorable present. Central to this research is the implicit assumption that nostalgia, because it

is a universal phenomenon, must serve some sort of adaptive function. It should be noted,

however, that these studies are experimental and, for this reason, results that show consistency

with any respective hypotheses are based on nostalgic memories that have been induced. In other

words, the participants in a “nostalgia condition” (as opposed to a control condition) have

actively sifted through their explicit memories to find an an applicable experience to the

experimental conditions. Thus, the memories that these researchers analyze are not new or

unfamiliar to the participants; they are most likely conscious, recursive episodes that have been

frequently rehearsed and perhaps even vocalized in other social settings. With this knowledge, it

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may be inferred that the nostalgic memories produced in the experimental context have retained

enough of their initial emotional valence to be temporally situated within the fabric of one’s

autobiographical memory.

The majority of new research on nostalgia has been conducted by social psychologists

Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut and their colleagues at the University of Southampton

in Hampshire, England. Although their collective findings are vast and intriguing, the studies

outlined in this work will be limited to those pertaining to the central aims of the present

investigation—firstly, the pursuit of inclusive factors in the nostalgic experience, and secondly,

the effects these factors may have on individuals’ perceptions of self continuity over time. An

appropriate starting point is a recent paper that has propounded a prototypical structure of the

nostalgic experience.

Sedikides et al. (2011) argue that the evidence suggesting that nostalgia serves positive

psychological functions, though promising, remain equivocal because the mechanisms and

properties of the actual experience have not been adequately delineated. Moreover, they

emphasize the fact that there still exists no coherent definition of nostalgia—one that gets to the

substance of the feeling, rather than the process. To resolve this problem, these researchers

recruited a group of 232 laypeople to list all the features that, in their opinion, distinguished

nostalgia. They then classified these responses into separate exemplars of meaning; in total, 35

descriptive features of nostalgia were generated. From this, it was possible to arrange these

features hierarchically according to their frequency. A median split determined the highest 18

features as “central” to nostalgia and the lowest 17 as “peripheral” features. The “central”

features related to fond, rose-tinted, and personally meaningful memories of childhood and

relationships. Although the “central” features focused mainly on positive emotions, they also

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contained some relevant negative feeling tones, such as missing and longing. The “peripheral”

features had feeling tones of grief and depression.

The reliability of this prototype was tested with another group of participants, who

characterized their own nostalgic events. The results exhibited a consensus, with the “central”

features of nostalgia appearing most frequently in participants’ narratives of experience. In

a third study, nostalgia was induced in a “central-prototype” group, a “peripheral-prototype”

group, and a “nostalgic event” group. For the two former conditions, the experimenters

induced nostalgia by presenting participants with a list of either “central” or “peripheral”

features, asking them to recall an event characterized by those features. They did not use the

word “nostalgia” in these conditions. In the “nostalgic event” condition, the experimenters asked

participants to reflect on a nostalgic event. In line with their predictions, participants reported

higher levels of state nostalgia in the “central-prototype” and “nostalgic event” conditions

than in the “peripheral-prototype” condition. Additionally, the words used by participants in

the “nostalgic event” condition to convey their experiences most often belonged to the list

of “central” features, and were typically used prior to any “peripheral” features. Together, these

findings demonstrated a prototypical structure of nostalgia that was far more compatible with its

Homeric meaning—i.e., as an elicited source of vitality at a time of irresolution, rather than the

historical understanding of nostalgia as psychologically destructive.

While this study outlines some thematic content of the nostalgic experience, there are

many other facets of meaning in nostalgia that exist outside of its emotional tones (e.g.

bittersweet longing) and its targets or objects (e.g. family vacations). For example, Davis (1979)

has noted that, across all theories of nostalgia, there is agreement that it is something in the

present situation that prompts reflection of the past, and for this reason, nostalgia “tells us more

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about present moods than past realities” (p. 10). With this view in mind, an examination of the

far-reaching motifs of nostalgia may support our search for the motivating forces behind its

emergence, and, reciprocally, an investigation of the triggers of nostalgia may have a bearing on

the qualities that are considered emblematic of the nostalgic experience.

In a series of studies, Wildschut and his colleagues performed content analyses of 42

autobiographical narratives on nostalgia. This was a fruitful method of compiling material, for it

did not rely on the laboratory context, which poses methodological constraints that are often

incompatible with the assessment of a natural phenomenon. When the authors perused the

collection of narratives, they discovered some notable, unifying elements among the

descriptions. Typically, these narratives featured the self as the protagonist, either in interactions

with close others or in momentous events, and encompassed more expressions of positive than

negative affect (Wildschut et al., 2006). One newly discerned pattern was that the protagonists in

these narratives frequently illustrated redemption (as opposed to contamination) sequences, in

which the self progressed from a negative condition to a favorable, triumphant one. In sum, these

narratives characterized nostalgia as a self-relevant and positive emotion, commonly centered

around memories of meaningful social interactions.

To determine the major triggers of nostalgia, the authors solicited a group of 172 university

students to provide descriptions of the conditions under which nostalgia has occurred for each of

them in the past. These results were then coded into categories and organized by prevalence, as

follows : negative affect; social interactions; sensory inputs (e.g. smells and music); tangibles

(i.e., relics); similar events; inertia; positive affect; anniversaries; and settings (e.g. one’s home

town). 38% of the participants listed a negative affective state as a precipitant of nostalgia—a

category that included descriptions of both discrete affective states (e.g. lonely) and generally

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negative moods (e.g. sad). This finding is especially interesting when one considers the affective

impact of engaging in nostalgic recollection. The authors found that, despite nostalgia being

triggered by negative affect, the final affective state of participants was characterized by

increased positivity, positive self-regard, and a perceived strengthening of social bonds. In

contrast, the participants in the control condition, who were asked to recall and describe an

ordinary event, did not experience these shifts in affect.

The authors used their observations to explore the broader implications of nostalgia as a

mechanism for psychological well-being. Their results suggest that nostalgic reverie can provide

therapeutic benefits when one is feeling disillusioned by present circumstances. The positive

augmentation of participants’ emotions, perceptions of continuity, and feelings of social

connectedness observed in this study are promising, and should be explored further in future

research.

What Makes Nostalgic Memory Different?

A principal question that has yet to be addressed is how nostalgia differs from ordinary

recollection of a lived past. Although the triggers, content, and functions of nostalgic memories

have been considered, these elements do not convey the particular feeling of the experience, like

that which we read in Proust. In fact, the explicit triggers and content appear to occupy the

peripheral regions of this cognitive and emotional constellation—that is, until they are

contemplated and subsequently ascribed with personal meaning.

An initial episode of nostalgic remembrance is awakened involuntarily, but thereafter

may be consciously harnessed to suit a particular purpose, such as to relay the memory to

another person or group, to reinterpret its meaning, or to assess the degree of resemblance

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or incongruity between one’s perceived past and present selves. But could we not claim that

this is true for all types of memory? It is entirely possible to recall a general memory of the

past, communicate it to others, and award it a place in one’s internal autobiography. Self-

relevant memories need not prompt visceral reactions to be deemed pertinent to one’s life story.

However, in these musings on the similarities between nostalgia and remembrance, we can see

the differences with greater clarity. To take an appreciative stance toward certain past events and

to feel a sense of sameness over time is incommensurate with nostalgia—a feeling that comprises

the warmth of familiarity and the vestigial pang of loss, which coalesce and imbue us with a

nebulous yet distinctive something that can only be supplemented with an explanation once the

individual creates one.

Memory is essential for the construction and maintenance of a continuous sense of identity

over time (Wilson & Ross, 2003; Schacter, 1996; James, 1950/1890). However, all memories are

not created equal. Studies in cognition and neuroscience have provided a tremendous amount of

insight into the nature of memory—what, why, and how people remember their pasts are no

longer insoluble questions that must be addressed with speculation. In the case of nostalgia, we

know that this experience has cognitive and affective components: the cognitive function is

employed in the act of recall and our perception works to elaborate the recollection (e.g., when

the event took place, how old one was, who was present, and what it means). The affective

elements of nostalgia detail how one felt during this past episode, as well as how one is feeling at

the time of recall. Due to the strong emotional tones and sensory awareness that are often

activated, it is also clear that the neural mechanisms of nostalgia are distinct from the neurology

of other memory encoding, storage, and retrieval processes. Our perceptions of nostalgic

memories have a unique salience, and are thus identified in our brains as qualitatively different

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from other memories of the past. The origin of these differences lie in cognitive and neurological

memory systems, and the dynamics of these cerebral interactions are crucial to our

understanding of the relationship between nostalgia and perceptions of temporal continuity.

Cognitive, Affective, and Motivational Aspects of Nostalgia

A number of variables may be considered when reflecting on a nostalgic memory. At the

time of retrieval, we may note the affective state or mood that we were in before or at the

moment the memory was triggered, as well as how we felt during and after this remembrance

occurred. If the affective state transforms upon memory recall, one will naturally search for the

reason behind this shift—what about this specific memory engendered such a profound change?

First, we may think about the possible motives for this retrieval. Wilson and Ross (2003)

argue that there is a two-step process involved in the recollection of autobiographical

memories: “Because present attributes and feelings are frequently more accessible than past

ones, individuals start this process with current self-appraisals, e.g., ‘How do I feel about X

today?’ Next, people invoke implicit theories about the stability of their own attributes and

feelings to construct a past that is similar to or different from the present.” This latter step tends

to involve a consistency bias, in which one unconsciously reshapes the past to make it consistent

with present thoughts, feelings, and beliefs (Schacter, 2003; Wilson & Ross, 2002). Studies have

shown the influential role of the self in the encoding and retrieval of episodic memories; when

information is encoded in relation to ourselves, it is usually remembered better and retrieved

more easily than other types of semantic memory (Brown & Kulik, 1977; Schacter, 2002).

James (1890/1950) posited that perceptions of continuity over time are necessary for

individuals to maintain a sense of cogent identity. People are motivated to feel and present

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themselves as stable and consistent, and to be recognized as such. We know that continuity

cannot exist without change; progressions in time, space, age, and development are the products

of continual successions of changes. However, because these movements are slight and occur in

sequence, we perceive these changes as continuous. This is neither an illusion nor a lie, but

rather the nature of human perception. Exaggerations or inferences of continuity are generally

the products of passive, unconscious motivation. In some cases, recollections of the past are

fabricated and inaccurate, depending on the current goal one is trying to accomplish, but this

should not be judged as an active attempt to alter or erase the past. Instead, his implicit

motivation should be viewed as a potentially adaptive force; if an individual perceives past

attitudes and traits as harmonious with current ones, this brings a level of self-prediction and self-

possession to an otherwise incongruous self.

Wilson and Ross also discuss the motivation for self-enhancement, which necessitates a

perception of change over time: “By depreciating their former satisfaction levels, individuals

create the illusion of improvement even in the face of actual decline.” With regard to nostalgia,

this latter critique may not be applicable, since engaging in nostalgic reverie usually comprises

an idealization of the past. Nevertheless, the feeling of discrepancy between current and former

selves certainly holds an influential position when one considers the effects of nostalgia on

perceptions of continuity. For most people, recent selves are discerned as more pertinent and

familiar than selves of a distant past, which may sometimes feel like strangers (Wilson and Ross,

2003; van der Kolk et al., 1991; Bell, 1997). This motivation for distance, like the motivation for

closeness, may serve an adaptive function, especially as it relates to trauma or major transitions.

By dissociating the past self from the current self, individuals mitigate threats to identity by

facilitating a sense of temporal and spatial distance—they may feel as though their lives have

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followed a trajectory of continual improvement due to or in spite of certain changes. In these

manipulations of subjective familiarity and distance, changes between the past and present can

either be justified (e.g. “X made me who I am today) or estranged (e.g. “That was the old

me,” “When X happened, I wasn’t myself”). Wilson and Ross emphasize that these acts of

remembering attend to personal benefit, rather than veracity. They are active functions of

identity maintenance, and the goal is not to recapture the truth of a past event, but to revise past

and present appraisals (although the two are not mutually exclusive). The bi-directional link

between memory and identity is demonstrated here—current self views influence recollection,

but are also influenced by what and how we remember.

In addressing the question of why a certain past event occurred, people recognize past

events either as connected to or separated from their current identity, based partly on how the

specific memory fits present self-representations. Additionally, individuals may either decide to

make sense of past events and incorporate them into a broader, cohesive narrative or to leave

these events unexplained, remote, and anomalous. Nigro and Neisser (1983) refer to the latter

as “observer” or “third person memory,” in which individuals reflect on early experiences from a

detached perspective, seeing them as objective circumstances.

The antithesis of this type of retrospection is referred to as “field memory,” which is

experienced as through eyes of the individual. Peoples’ field memories are often more emotional

and vivid than observer memories, so one would presume that most nostalgic memories fit into

this category. Whether an individual remembers a past event from a field or an observer

perspective depends on motivation at the time of attempted recall (Schacter, 1996). A powerful

stimulus in the present, such as an intense emotion or meaningful artifact, will likely provoke

memories experienced from a field position. Field memories are an indication of enduring ties to

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the past; the rememberer is using the same eyes to reminisce on this episode as s/he did when

the event was originally experienced, and the emotions of this past are felt in the present. In this

way, the memory seems to have preserved its authenticity, as well as its association with the

present self.

Another cognitive component of nostalgia relates to judgment and affect once a nostalgic

memory has been recalled. Leboe and Ansons (2006) executed an investigation into the

cognitive roots of nostalgia, and based on their results, they claimed that the subjective

experience of nostalgia is a misattribution of positive affect and vivid imagery; they are caused

by the act of successful recall, but are attributed to the content of the memory: “Recollections

that are rich in meaning are unique in their capacity to produce a positive affective response . . .

mentally transport a person to some prior circumstance, giving them the subjective impression

that they are reliving the past” (p. 607).

Recollections with such evocative power are generally influenced by perceptual fluency—

a term used to describe the speed and ease with which stimuli are cognitively processed. Stimuli

that have high fluency will be quickly recognized, conveying to the individual a feeling of

familiarity. The subsequent perception is that this stimulus belongs to some aspect of the

person’s past. Even stimuli that elicit ambiguous feelings of familiarity will prompt the

controlled search for a memory with an episodic representation of the stimulus, in order to

mitigate these feelings of uncertainty (Jacoby et al., 1985). Once this recollection rushes into

consciousness, a burst of positive affect will accompany the memory as the result of successful

recall.

A host of studies have demonstrated the links between perceptual-cognitive processes and

affective response (e.g. Bornstein, 1999; Jacoby; Kihlstrom, 1987; LeDoux, 2002; Schacter,

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1996). One of the most groundbreaking findings, striking in its similarity to Freud’s hypothesis,

has been the observed existence of the cognitive nonconscious. It is now widely acknowledged

that subliminal perception and implicit memory (what Freud referred to as the unconscious) can

affect mental functions without being consciously perceived or remembered. For example, Reber

et al.’s (2004) research on perceptual fluency and judgments of aesthetic beauty reveal that

stimuli with high processing capability (i.e., stimuli that are easily processed in the brain) have

an intrinsic hedonic marking, which naturally elicits a perception of familiarity and evaluative

judgments of pleasantness and attraction. Visual stimuli with certain objective features, such as

symmetry, a large amount of information, figure-ground contrast, and clarity, are easily

processed by individuals, and have been shown to result in a conscious, positive affect. It is not,

however, the perceptual or processing fluency that facilitates these judgments and preferences,

since fluency is often experienced without conscious awareness. Instead, the positive affective

reaction to these processes is what the observer consciously interprets and misattributes to the

content of the object itself.

Nostalgic memories are often vivid, strong in emotional valence, and contain a specific

spatiotemporal orientation. If these contextual elements remain intact upon recall, we can assume

that most stimuli for nostalgia have an innate hedonic marking that allows for fluency in

processing and retrieval. In this way, the perceived spark of familiarity in an object or experience

will prompt the conscious self, the active rememberer, to take up a heuristic search for an

episode that conforms with the feelings induced by the stimulus and satisfies current self-

representations (Bornstein, 1999). “When we perceive an event, we activate fragments of pre-

existing knowledge stored in memory; when we attend to the event, the corresponding mental

representation becomes part of our working memory” (Kihlstrom, 1992). This recreation of

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memory parallels Wilson and Ross’ proposition that motivated perceptions of spatiotemporal

orientation (closeness or distance) have a bidirectional link with motivated self-appraisals of

either continuity or change over time.

Since perceptual, processing, and retrieval fluency are usually high in memories and

artifacts that induce nostalgia, this not only explains our tendency to augment the past as more

favorable and rose-tinted, but also makes the previously unaccountable feeling of “warmth”

more intelligible as a phenomenon. Leboe and Ansons’ argument may be true in this case—that

these positive feelings are misattributions of cognitive efficiency to the content of the

recollection. Additionally, it is possible that egocentric and consistency biases are concurrent

forces in this type of retrospection, “allowing us to remember the past in a way that supports our

current self” (Schacter, 2002).

In the investigation of cognitive, affective, and motivational mechanisms behind nostalgia,

we have concretized some of the elusive aspects of the nostalgic experience. When presented in

their technical form, these treasured, poignant sensations are seen as the outcomes of cognitive

errors. Do these scientific truths damage our appreciative impressions of nostalgia? Should they

have been kept ambiguous? That is all a matter of subjective judgment. Taking a favorable

stance toward one’s past may not always be reflective of reality, but the construction of such an

illusion has proven to be an adaptive strategy in its capacity to revive self-relevant, temporal

associations and improve upon one’s present affective state.

It must also be acknowledged that, no matter what errors, biases, and imaginings we instill

in the memories that make us nostalgic, nostalgia is a real feeling—one that satisfies our need for

a tangible past that can inhabit our present. As T.S. Eliot writes, this sense of mobile history

gratifies “not only the pastness of the past, but of its presence . . . a sense of the timeless as well

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as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together” (Eliot, 1932). The abstract

power of this sensation should not be overlooked, nor should the formal, technical means of its

emergence.

The Neurobiology of Nostalgia

Emotional memories are distinctively encoded, consolidated, and activated in the brain,

and therefore elicit unique subjective experiences of them. Beginning in the 1980’s, the

development of brain imaging technology enabled neuroscientists to look inside the human brain

and watch activity in various regions as people engaged in higher mental functions, such as

perception, action, language, and planning (Kandel, 2006). In particular, two brain structures,

located deep within the cerebral cortex, have been shown to play crucial roles in the processing

and regulation of affective memories. The first is the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped

formation that is activated at the onset of emotional arousal. The amygdala learns and modulates

the emotional content of events, so that the same emotionally charged stimuli, if encountered

again, will implicitly prompt the appropriate behavioral and affective responses.

The second significant formation, located next to the amygdala, is the hippocampus. This

structure is concerned with the details of episodic memory, including the spatial and temporal

context in which the event occurred. The hippocampus is also influential in converting short-

term memories to long-term memories, a process known as long-term potentiation, which

develops through mechanisms of prolonged synaptic plasticity and transmission (Kandel, 2006).

This hippocampal process marks common semantic features among different episodes so that

they are identified and grouped in our memory through associative links.

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Amygdala-hippocampal interactions have been demonstrated to support the enhancement

of episodic memory for emotionally significant events (Anderson et al., 2006). In turn, greater

recollection for emotional events causes them to be more richly experienced in memory (Todd &

Anderson, 2009). While the amygdala is responsible for processing and strengthening the

general affective tone of the initial event and moderating the emotional response to its

subsequent retrievals (a form of procedural learning), the hippocampus records the contextual

elements and mnemonic features that correspond with this global emotional representation,

building a localized neural substrate for emotional behavior that can be identified by the

individual and expressed as declarative knowledge.

Early models of affective neuroscience understood emotion as an instinctively elicited

response to the conscious perception of a momentous circumstance. This conscious recognition

was thought to trigger unconscious, reflexive, and autonomic reactions in the body (Kandel,

2006). William James, in his seminal, highly debated paper, ‘What is Emotion?’ (1884),

challenged this prevailing hypothesis, arguing that the physiological expression of emotion

precedes any associated cognitive experience. This principle became the basis for what is known

as the James-Lange theory, which advances the notion that emotions result from a physiological

reaction (e.g. an increase or decrease in blood pressure, heart rate, and muscular tension) to an

emotional stimulus, rather than the other way around. In this process, sensations are turned into

perceptions, thoughts, and memories (Dalgleish, 2004).

The autobiographical events that linger in our memory possess a potent affective valence,

first activated at the time of the event, which was encoded and received prolonged strengthening

over time. Upon evocation, these memories continue to be richly experienced, both cognitively

and physiologically. The representation of a memory in the brain—otherwise known as the

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engram—has a powerful influence on how we subjectively experience memories of a lived past.

Daniel Schacter (1996) has eloquently defined the engram and its functions:

Engrams are the transient or enduring changes in our brains that result from encoding an experience . . . the brain records an event by strengthening the connections between groups of neurons that participate in encoding the experience. A typical incident in our everyday lives consists of numerous sights, sounds, actions, and words. Different areas of the brain analyze these varied aspects of an event. As a result, neurons in the different regions become more strongly connected to one another. The new pattern of connections constitutes the brain’s record of the event: the engram . . . These patterns of connections have the potential to enter awareness, to contribute to explicit remembering under the right circumstances, but at any one instant most of them lie dormant (pp. 58-59).

Whether the emergence of nostalgia is deliberate or spontaneous, the navigation through

associated groups of neurons that allow for retrieval of the respective episode proceeds in a

similar way. Returning our thoughts to the episode of the madeleine, it was noted that the cookie

acted as the sensory stimulus and retrieval cue, provoking a chain reaction of cognitive and

affective processes, which began with physiological excitation, followed by a vivid

reexperiencing of the past, and ended with a judgment of the episode as salient.

A moment of recollection involves concomitant workings from perceptual, sensory,

affective, motivational, and cognitive networks in the nervous system. The dramatic “flash” of

involuntary remembrance arises from “the mutually enhancing effects of greater sympathetic

arousal, amygdala recruitment, increased attention, and amplified perceptual processing, known

together as ‘motivated attention’” (Todd & Anderson, 2009). Amygdala activity facilitates the

induction and expression of hippocampal long-term potentiation. Thus, the degree of amygdala

arousal correlates with the ease of subsequent recall, which may explain why nostalgic memories

remain detailed, evocative, and easily retrieved after their first recollection (Ochsner, 2000;

McGaugh, 2004).

The neurobiology of emotional memory clarifies the question of why these artifacts,

places, and scenes scarcely leave us, when so many other aspects of our pasts seem to decay or

become muted over time. Although the initial impact of a nostalgic episode is usually context-

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and/or state-dependent, indicative of associative retrieval processes, deliberate reminiscence is a

labored act of strategic retrieval, which often draws from mnemonics encoded at the time of the

episode’s occurrence. Visual imagery mnemonics—i.e., forming an image and connecting it to a

mental location or an affective state —contribute to the lucidity and ease of recollection and

cultivate a thread of semantic self-knowledge that weaves autobiographical memories together

(Schacter, 1996). We are intermittently confronted with the knowledge of our own forgotten

pasts; the people, topography, beliefs, and images of our histories become markedly uncertain.

By contrast, the objects of our nostalgia do not appear to suffer this fate—these emotive

memories remain bright and redolent of our enduring identities, owing in part to the ways our

brains responds to these fragments of experience and links them together.

By this point, we have explored various phenomenological facets of nostalgia. Another

vital component of this analysis, which has been mentioned but not explicitly addressed, is the

social dimension of the nostalgic experience. Batcho’s (1995), Sedikides et al.’s (2011), and

Wildschut et al.’s (2006) studies have illustrated the social features that exist in the thematic

content of nostalgic memories—these investigators observed that most nostalgic memories

comprise the remembered presence of friends, family, and loved ones. However, this research

has not examined nostalgia as a collective or interactive engagement. When we think about time,

place, heritage, and memory, the collective past has no less significance than the personal. At

various rendezvous and rituals, such as weddings, funerals, and high school reunions, the

members of a time- or place-based collective rehash shared memories to note the similarities and

differences between the mutual past and personal present.

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The private, reflective past is predicated on the existence of a past shared by one’s

community; personal history is imprinted with the associations, symbols, and values inherited

and created by the culture of which one is part. Social upheavals affect the person and the group,

which poses a multifarious threat to self continuity—we commonly rely on certain others to

reassure our perceptions of continuous identity, to tell us that we are the same, that we haven’t

changed, that we are still ourselves. However, in a time of cultural disruption, individuals

are confronted with a kind of discontinuity that transcends personal concerns. Nostalgia in

these circumstances can be infused with the emotions of thousands of people, all of whom

have literally and symbolically lost their personal, cultural, and national homes. Is it possible

for collective nostalgia to provide solace in cases of such fractured continuity? If not, what

implications do these breaches have for individual and collective perceptions of identity?

Collective Nostalgia: Reconstructing Time and Place With Memory

I can’t throw a bridge between the present and the past, and therefore [I[ can’t make time move.— Eva Hoffman, pp. 116-117

To some extent, individuals can seal past experiences through overdeterminism—we may

deduce that X occurred as a direct result of how we were reared by our caregivers, our

enculturation and acquisition of knowledge, and a host of other biographical events that preceded

and effectually caused X (e.g. Robinson, 1977). We impose order on our lives by situating

meaningful experiences within a spatial and temporal framework of causality, creating a mental

landscape of continuity between thoughts, feelings, and actions. We reify and shelter these

sacred spaces from the forces of fragmentation so that we may feel as though they are ensured

against potential loss. The pretense of order that we create for ourselves has a major caveat in

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that we become heedless to unbidden chance. The unknowable—the realm that we are eternally

incapable of reaching—can infiltrate our conditional networks of self-understanding and

suddenly undo the ties of identity that we believed were secure. Precipitants of such disturbance

may exist on an individual and a collective scale, but the resulting privations of the latter are

often of greater consequence.

Within a culture—especially one that faces prejudice—the shared categories of

understanding that seem immutable, such as language, symbolism, legacy, and topography, can

be eroded by the hands of commanding forces. When subjugated or otherwise victimized groups

of people are forced to reconstruct their lives from the fragments of ruin, the surrounding social

framework shapes the remembrance, communication, and interpretation of these losses. The

collective past may transform into memories that become repressed, haunted, idealized, or

publicly silenced. Apfelbaum (2000) maintains that victims need to tell their stories within a

wider social forum in order to make sense of their lived traumatic events. Otherwise, these

memories are entombed, receiving no legitimation except when shared with fellow sufferers,

which engenders a dissociation between individuals’ private and public lives.

Nostalgia that subsumes personal experience within an individual’s fallen cultural milieu

and history embodies a kind of trans-personal remembrance—a strive to convalesce a now

indivisible duo of collective and personal selfhood. One could expect that this type of nostalgia

is most influential and enlightening when shared with others, especially those who have

experienced the same loss. In all likelihood, individuals within disrupted collectives are stirred

by a similar feeling of nostalgia, for they possess the same acute perception of the temporal,

spatial, collective, and personal discontinuities that have broken all past notions of coherence.

Collective uprooting has sweeping implications for identity, and Apfelbaum argues that

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the attempt to rationalize the causes behind such events is an ineffectual approach to

psychological recovery. Instead, she believes we need a theoretical framework that realizes

the “importance of sociocultural contexts and the fact that people are enmeshed in genealogical

filiations as members of a family history, as well as in a broader society’s history and its

changing representations.” Without a public outlet for expression, silence becomes inevitable

as speech is rendered impossible. Consequently, the children of future generations are born

bereft of their origins, but are nonetheless forced to bear the weight of a cultural past that is

abstract, misapprehended, or unintelligible. A narrative of personal experience, framed within

a substantive, collective chronicle, is paramount for victims and their children to reclaim the

past. In itself, the past does not make the present meaningful; it is the internally recognized,

collectively understood, and openly expressed representation of the past that brings meaning

to the present. A plurality of voices, “publicly acknowledged and memorialized . . . can be a

beneficial trigger for a delayed morning, as well as for a reconstruction of broken identities”

(Apfelbaum, 2000).

~ ~ ~

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia— Milan Kundera, 1984, p. 4.

The experience of nostalgia, we have learned, is both universal and particular. The

universality of the feelings, thoughts, events, and places that fill us with nostalgia should not be

interpreted as a denial of differences. We may possess a rational understanding of the nostalgic

memories that our friends and family hold as meaningful traces of identity, because we

understand and appreciate the people who view them as such. However, the feeling of nostalgia,

the crux of the experience, is particular to the individual and relies on the warm sense of

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familiarity that arises from the recollection of a lived and living history. In reading fiction and

poetry, we can locate evocative passages that remind us of how nostalgia is a phenomenon of

sameness and difference. Proust’s episode of the madeleine captures the universal in the

particular; we simultaneously know and do not know the essence of this experience.

Similarly, the nature of continuity encompasses the duality of sameness and difference. At

one moment an individual may recognize his/her unity—the unbroken conduit of identity,

carrying experiences that can be be perceived as temporally fixed points on a trajectory or as

symbolic of the trajectory itself. In this united whole, we recognize the differences in its parts,

for continuity cannot be realized without the preliminary awareness of its existence as a

framework that constantly assimilates change over time. With nostalgia, we uncover this

principle of continuity through memory: in looking back on a “before”—before autonomy,

before suffering, before discernment, before wrongdoing, we see the innocence of what was and

now is not, and also feel the innocence that has survived within us. We can recapture the

sameness within the difference: this is our enigmatic ability to make time move.

The phenomenological explanations of nostalgia that have been garnered throughout

this work are not intended to capture the nature of the experience, for such an ambition would

be fruitless. The matters addressed in this exploration of nostalgia are meant to illustrate the

flexibility of our relationship with time and place and how, through memory, our nostalgia for

that which is lost can be assuaged by our symbolic return home.

26

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