The Hedonic Character of Nostalgia: An Integrative Data Analysis
Leunissen and colleagues combined the affect measures from forty-one experiments that induced nostalgia, covering more than four and a half thousand participants, to settle what kind of feeling it actually is. The answer is mixed rather than simply pleasant. Nostalgia inductions increased positive feeling and increased ambivalent feeling, in which pleasure and sadness are present together, while not reliably changing negative feeling. The size of these effects varied a great deal depending on how nostalgia was elicited and what it was compared against, which is the methodological point the authors press: conclusions about whether nostalgia feels good depend heavily on the control condition a study happened to use. The bittersweet character is not an artefact to be cleaned away but the thing itself. This vault cites it whenever nostalgia is described as straightforwardly pleasant.
Leunissen and colleagues combined the affect measures from forty-one experiments that induced nostalgia, covering more than four and a half thousand participants, to settle what kind of feeling it actually is. The answer is mixed rather than simply pleasant. Nostalgia inductions increased positive feeling and increased ambivalent feeling, in which pleasure and sadness are present together, while not reliably changing negative feeling. The size of these effects varied a great deal depending on how nostalgia was elicited and what it was compared against, which is the methodological point the authors press: conclusions about whether nostalgia feels good depend heavily on the control condition a study happened to use. The bittersweet character is not an artefact to be cleaned away but the thing itself. This vault cites it whenever nostalgia is described as straightforwardly pleasant.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
41 experiments, N = 4,659; nostalgia inductions raised positive and ambivalent affect and did not significantly alter negative affect.
Where we use it
- Your Nostalgia Is Lying to You, Why We Come Back
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073920950455
DOI: 10.1177/1754073920950455