Julius Frankenbach

Who they are

Nostalgia research had a problem of the kind that meta-analysis exists to solve. A large number of experiments, most of them produced within one closely connected programme, reported that nostalgia supports a set of psychological goods. Each study on its own is small. The claim built on them is large and has travelled well beyond psychology.

The 2021 pooling separates the two questions properly. On functions, across 116 studies, robust main effects came out for self-esteem, optimism, meaning in life, self-continuity and social connectedness. Those are the outcomes this site is willing to attach to nostalgia, and the reason it is willing is the pooling rather than any single result.

The paper also asked whether neuroticism disrupts the benefits, which is the question an applied reader should want answered. If nostalgia is offered as a resource for coping, whether it works for people who are prone to negative affect is not a detail. Testing a moderator like that, rather than reporting a main effect and stopping, is what separates a useful meta-analysis from an inventory.

He is the first author and this page credits him as one. The standing instruction in the vault is to credit Frankenbach first here, because the paper is habitually cited for the senior names on the programme instead.

Key papers

Frankenbach, J., Wildschut, T., Juhl, J., & Sedikides, C. (2021). Meta-analysis of nostalgia's functions and affective consequences. First author. One hundred and sixteen functions studies and thirty-nine affect studies, 3,556 participants. Robust main effects on self-esteem, optimism, meaning in life, self-continuity and social connectedness, with neuroticism tested as a moderator of those benefits.

Leunissen, J., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., & Routledge, C. (2021). "The Hedonic Character of Nostalgia: An Integrative Data Analysis." The companion pooling from the same year, on how nostalgia feels rather than what it does. Forty-one experiments and 4,659 participants; inductions raised positive and ambivalent affect and did not significantly alter negative affect.

Key ideas

Pool first. Most of the nostalgia literature comes from one research programme, so individual studies are less independent of each other than a reader would assume.

The functions that survive pooling are self-esteem, optimism, meaning in life, self-continuity and social connectedness.

Testing a moderator is the useful part. Whether an effect holds for the people most likely to be offered it as a remedy is a different question from whether the effect exists.

Credit the first author. That is a standing rule on this site and it applies here more than usual, because the paper is filed almost everywhere under the programme's senior names.

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