Whether it’s refusing to throw away your long-dead Tamagotchi or continuing to cuddle a childhood stuffed animal hanging on for dear life, nostalgia can manifest in odd ways. But according to a recent study, the tendency toward it may lead to a more productive outcome than just rewatching Gilmore Girls for the fifth time (no judgment here!).
Researchers from the University of Buffalo and Kyoto University found that nostalgic people may be more motivated to strengthen and maintain long-term relationships than those who aren’t. Why? When we reminisce about the good times we’ve spent with loved ones, we appreciate them more — and are more driven to maintain those connections, the team suggests.
“People who feel nostalgic more often and value those memories are more aware of their important relationships and the need to nurture them,” Kuan-Ju Huang, a doctoral student at Kyoto University who co-authored the study, said in a statement. “This means these friendships may be more likely to last, even as we get older and our lives, interests, and responsibilities change.”
Inspired by his own wistfulness during the COVID-19 pandemic, Huang and his research partner, Ya-Hui Chang, administered three experiments to evaluate nostalgia’s impact on relationships. They looked specifically at nostalgia as a “trait-like characteristic” (as opposed to an experience), which they defined in the study as a proclivity to think fondly about good, meaningful experiences from the past. All three experiments analyzed the effect of nostalgia on the size of social networks and levels of closeness in relationships.
The first experiment surveyed a group of 676 undergraduate students at the University of Buffalo about their social networks and how nostalgic they are. Those who scored higher in the characteristic had the closest relationships — with people they said it would be hard to imagine life without — and were more motivated to maintain their social networks.
The results of the second experiment, which surveyed U.S. adults with an average age of 40 and included a brief personality test, were similar. Nostalgic folks were increasingly driven to maintain their relationships, which led to larger social circles than their less nostalgic peers. The third, however, aimed to see if those tendencies would stand the test of time.
The researchers looked at subjects from an ongoing Dutch study over a seven-year period, and discovered that “those with low nostalgia experienced a dramatic decrease in the number of their closest social networks,” unlike the participants with high or moderate nostalgia. “In other words, nostalgia seems to protect individuals from losing close network members over the long term,” the authors write.
Unsurprisingly, the experiment that analyzed data from a seven-year period also indicated that the participants grew more nostalgic as they aged, scoring 0.26 points higher on average in 2019 than 2013. Huang said this finding aligns with prior research on the subject, while adding that young adults can also be increasingly wistful.
“There is evidence showing that young adults report nostalgic feelings slightly more frequently than middle-aged adults, while older adults report dramatically higher levels of nostalgia,” he said, adding: “Young adults may reminisce about their high school years or family moments when facing challenges during the transition to adulthood. For older adults, nostalgia is more likely to be associated with experiences about loss and feelings of a limited future.”
Now that a likely link between nostalgia and social networks has been established, the authors muse that further research could examine exactly what strategies nostalgia motivates us to use when it comes to maintaining our relationships. But for now, it’s enough to know that there’s another good reason to reminisce.
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