Nostalgia
[5] There is a predisposition, caused by cognitive biases such as rosy retrospection, for people to view the past more positively and the future more negatively.
[6][7][8] When applied to one's beliefs about a society or institution, this is called declinism, which has been described as "a trick of the mind" and as "an emotional strategy, something comforting to snuggle up to when the present day seems intolerably bleak".
Consistent with its Greek word roots meaning "homecoming" and "pain", nostalgia was for centuries considered a potentially debilitating and sometimes fatal medical condition characterized by expressing extreme homesickness.
Nostalgia has been found to have important psychological functions, such as to improve mood, increase social connectedness, enhance positive self-regard, and provide existential meaning.
[14] Nostalgia can lead individuals to perceive the past more favorably than the present, a phenomenon known as the 'nostalgia effect,' which is classified as a cognitive bias.
Nostalgia sometimes involves memories of people one was close to, such as family members, romantic lovers, or friends, and thus it can increase one's sense of social support and connections.
The researchers looked again at self-attributes and found that the participants who were not exposed to nostalgic experiences reflected a pattern of selfish and self-centered attributes.
[24] Nostalgia helps increase one's self-esteem and meaning in life by buffering threats to well-being and also by initiating a desire to deal with problems or stress.
The second study revealed that nostalgia increases one's perceived meaning in life, which was thought to be mediated by a sense of social support or connectedness.
In the first study, these effects were statistically mediated by nostalgia-induced positive affect—the extent to which nostalgia made participants feel good.
[27] One recent study critiques the idea of nostalgia, which in some forms can become a defense mechanism by which people avoid the historical facts.
[31] In a 2014 study conducted by Routledge, he and a team observed that the more people reported having major disruptions and uncertainties in their lives, the more they nostalgically longed for the past.
Routledge suggests that by invoking the idea of an idealized past, politicians can provoke the social and cultural anxieties and uncertainties that make nostalgia especially attractive—and effective—as a tool of political persuasion.
[32][33] A person can deliberately trigger feelings of nostalgia by listening to familiar music, looking at old photos, or visiting comforting environments of the past.
[36] Environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term 'solastalgia' in his 2003 book Solastalgia: a new concept in human health and identity.
With solastalgia, in contrast, the grief is typically caused by environmental destruction, so the separation between subject and object is ontological rather than spatial: it is permanent and unbridgeable, and can be experienced while continuing to occupy the same irreversibly degraded place.
On 3 September 1770 he stated that the sailors "were now pretty far gone with the longing for home which the Physicians have gone so far as to esteem a disease under the name of Nostalgia", but his journal was not published in his lifetime.
Great lengths were taken to study and understand the condition to stem the tide of troops leaving the front in droves (see the BBC documentary Century of the Self).
The term "feeling nostalgic" is more commonly used to describe pleasurable emotions associated with, or a longing to return to, a particular period of time.
It became somewhat of a topos in Romantic literature, and figures in the poem Der Schweizer by Achim von Arnim (1805) and in Clemens Brentano's Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1809), as well as in the opera Le Chalet, by Adolphe Charles Adam (1834), which was performed for Queen Victoria under the title The Swiss Cottage.
German Romanticism coined an opposite to Heimweh, Fernweh "far-sickness", "longing to be far away", like wanderlust expressing the Romantic desire to travel and explore.
The creation of the nostalgic other allows mainstream populations to commodify the racial purity and stability of the past but refuses the community agency to change in the present by highlighting its negative traits.
Due to efficient advertising schemes, consumers need not have experienced a specific event or moment in time in order to feel nostalgic for it.
Vicarious nostalgia is a feeling of wistful yearning for a moment that occurred prior to, or outside of, the span of one's memory, but is relatable (has sentimental value) due to repeated mediated exposure to it.
Vintage, rustic and old-fashioned design styles can also be seen in nostalgia-based ad campaigns that companies such as Coca-Cola and Levi Strauss & Co.
[46] Developed within the marketing discipline, forestalgia[1], defined as an individual's yearning for an idealized future, serves as a future-focused counterpart to nostalgia.
[49] Like nostalgia, where only the happy memories are retained, forestalgia explains customers’ intentions to escape the present to a romanticized future where current concerns are no longer an issue.
