Examining Nostalgia's Impact on Depressive Symptomology

Abstract

Nostalgic memories are universal experiences that typically contain emotions characterized by a warm, sentimental yearning for the past or tales of redemption leading to triumph (Wildschut, Sedikides, Arndt, & Routledge, 2006). Several studies have documented nostalgic recall’s ability to enhance psychological well-being through increasing the sense of a cohesive self-identity across time, promoting social connectedness, and drawing on past experiences to enhance problem solving and to guide future behaviors. The domains of these effects overlap with the socio-cognitive deficits occurring in depression and being able to elicit these effects would be helpful for addressing the corresponding depressive symptoms. However, there is a paucity of research assessing the degree to which mood state impacts the nostalgic recall process. Mindfulness interventions have been shown to increase richness of memory recall and reduce depressive symptoms through augmenting attention and reducing rumination. This study hypothesized that these changes resulting from a brief mindfulness intervention would increase state levels of nostalgia. A series of three experiments investigated the relationship between level of depressive symptomology and the state level of nostalgia as well as how mindfulness impacts this relationship. Experiments 1 (n = 200) and 2 (n = 200) examined the effects of level of depressive symptomology on the state level of nostalgia in an online sample recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and in a sample of undergraduate students. Experiment 3 (n = 473) examined how a brief mindfulness intervention impacted these effects and how mindfulness and nostalgia effected depressive symptomology over the course of the experiment. The present project provided evidence for the impact of heightened state levels of nostalgia on depressive symptomology and demonstrated that 1) higher depressive symptomology reduces state levels of nostalgia, 2) higher subjectively reported levels of mindfulness improve state levels of nostalgia, as measured by the State Functions of Nostalgia Scale (Hepper, Ritchie, Sedikides, & Wildschut, 2012), and 3) engaging in nostalgic recall and higher state levels of nostalgia predicted decreases in depressive symptomology.