Nostalgia was once diagnosed as a disease that could kill homesick soldiers
A 17th-century medical student invented the word nostalgia, from Greek for homecoming and pain, to name the anguish of Swiss mercenaries serving far from home. For centuries doctors treated it as a debilitating, sometimes fatal illness. Today psychologists see a common and often helpful emotion that can lift mood, ease loneliness and even make people feel warmer.
Early modern physicians classed it as a kind of melancholy, and the Romantics later made it a favourite literary theme. The modern view reverses the verdict. Nostalgia is usually a bittersweet longing for a past, real or idealised, that cannot be recovered, and it is often sparked by negative feelings. Yet studies suggest the net effect tends to be positive: better mood, stronger feelings of social connection, higher self-regard and a firmer sense that life has meaning.
Several experiments illustrate this. Zhou and colleagues in 2008 found that loneliness triggers nostalgia, which in turn raises people's sense of social support. Clay Routledge's team reported in 2011 that nostalgia boosts perceived meaning in life, and that threats to meaning themselves provoke nostalgic reflection. Baldwin and Landau found in 2014 that nostalgic participants rated themselves as more open to unfamiliar people and places. One study even linked fond memories to feeling physically warmer, and cold weather appears to make people more nostalgic.
The emotion has a darker side. A bias called rosy retrospection tilts people toward seeing the past as better and the future as worse; applied to whole societies, it becomes declinism. Routledge observed in 2014 that people facing major disruption long more for the past, and suggested that politicians can exploit an idealised past as a persuasive tool. A study of how South Africans remember apartheid distinguished restorative nostalgia, a wish to go back, from a more critical reflective kind.
Triggers range from songs, films and television to old video games, childhood homes and weather. A song heard once and then not again for years can summon one exact moment, while one played constantly loses that link. The environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined a cousin term, solastalgia, in 2003: grief for a home degraded by environmental damage, where the loss is permanent even if you never leave.
Source: Nostalgia
