Do Be So Sentimental

There is a scene in the 1983 Soviet film Nostalghia, made by the brooding and metaphysical director Andrei Tarkovsky, which lasts more than eight and a half minutes and was shot in a single take. In it, a man in a long gray coat lights a candle, cups it in his hand, and begins to walk slowly across the surface of an emptied pool, turning his body from one direction to another to keep the wind at his back and the candle’s flame burning.

Though he sometimes makes it almost all the way across the pool, time and again the fire sputters out before he reaches his destination. When it does so, he returns to his starting position to light it once more and start his walk over. As he staggers back to the beginning over and over, he seems both defeated and resolute. The scene evokes a Sisyphean sense of purpose, the man’s act seeming suffused with the desire to reach a place that may not even exist. It is an apt metaphor for the ache of nostalgia.

Nostalgia’s literal meaning is the pain evoked by the desire to return home—and, for many, it is indeed a painful, or at least bittersweet, experience. After the word’s invention in the 17th century, it was considered a psychiatric disease for a long time. More recently, it’s been called a form of depression. Yet we all, no matter how young or old, feel the pull of nostalgia. Why? Does this wistful longing serve a useful purpose?

A slew of recent social psychology research has uncovered some surprising findings about nostalgia, with scientists teasing apart a few of the possible evolutionary functions it serves. Here are a few of the roles sentimentality, it seems, may play in our lives:

Mitigating Memento Mori

According to the theory within psychology known as “terror management,” human beings (capable, unlike other species, of becoming conscious of their own mortality) engage in a variety of unconscious psychological protections to manage the abject fear they feel when confronted with reminders of their impending deaths. Nostalgia appears to be one such management strategy.

In one experiment, some participants were given a writing prompt that actively encouraged them to wax nostalgic about an important event in their lives, while others were asked to free-write about an ordinary event from the previous week. When given a word-completion task in which several word fragments could be completed with either a neutral or a death-related word (for example, the fragment COFF_ _ could be completed as COFFEE or COFFIN), those who had been manipulated into feeling nostalgic were less likely to create “death-words.” In other words, if you’ve just been feeling nostalgic, you’re less likely to be thinking about death at all.

In another experiment, researchers first collected a personality measurement from their subjects that gauged how prone they were to think about the past and how positively they viewed it. Then, they induced one group of participants to reflect on their own deaths by asking them to write responses to the questions: “Briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you” and “Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead.” Another group was asked to answer similarly provocative questions—only their topic was the emotional and physical discomfort associated with having a painful dental procedure.

After having all the participants complete a final questionnaire examining how meaningful they believed life to be, correlations between the three tests were calculated. As hypothesized, among those who were asked to reflect on their own mortality, “the more positively participants viewed their past, the less they perceived life to be meaningless.” There was no significant correlation between the two characteristics in those who reflected on dental procedures. What this suggests, the scientists concluded, is that if you’re generally a nostalgic person, and you’re confronted with the concept of death, your tendency towards nostalgia may kick in to help to imbue life with meaning. In doing so, it helps to ease your fear of death.

Fighting Loneliness

Scientists have known for some time that chronic loneliness has detrimental effects on health. Since there is evidence that loneliness can trigger nostalgia, could it be that reminiscing somehow counteracts those feelings of isolation?

To find out, Sun Yat-Sen University’s Xinyue Zhou conducted a series of experiments on children, university students, and factory workers. In one, they tested kids who had recently moved from rural China to big cities, and were especially likely to be feeling set adrift from their social support network. The results of a detailed psychological analysis of these children showed that those who were the most lonely were also, often, the most nostalgic. And their nostalgia appeared to restore their sense that they were connected to others (by reminding them of friends and family).

These and other experiments led the scientists to conclude that nostalgia “magnifies perceptions of social support and, in so doing, thwarts the effect of loneliness. Nostalgia restores an individual’s social connectedness.” They also found that “the association between loneliness and nostalgia is particularly pronounced among highly resilient individuals. It is these individuals who, when lonely, report high levels of nostalgia.” So—contrary to the notion that sentimentality makes a person weak—the tougher you are, the more likely you are to reflect fondly on the past.

Ego-Boosting and Identity-Building

Nostalgia plays at least two other useful functions. Not surprisingly, it tends to bring to the forefront positive experiences we wish to remember. In the lab, when scientists successfully evoked feelings of nostalgia in subjects, they later reported a greater sense of “positive self-regard and positive affect”: it helped them feel prouder of themselves and happier in general.

Nostalgia is also a pathway for exploring many different versions of ourselves, enabling us to construct a coherent self-identity that incorporates both past and present. This can be difficult when, for example, people are displaced from a familiar and well-loved environment. In two studies, researchers found that nostalgia helped to decrease anxiety and maintain a sense of self in coffee shop employees whose old workplace was moved, as well as in university professors whose institution was taken over by what felt like a hostile force.

In light of these fascinating studies, it’s hard to resist the temptation to sit down with a box of old photographs for an afternoon or two. But if you do, hold the image of Tarkovsky’s hero crossing the pool with a sputtering candle in your mind, as well. If reminiscence threatens to pull us backwards, to a world that is long gone and can never be reached, it may truly be fair to call it a disease.