Nostalgia, the social prospective
Nostalgia is a social emotion. When people reflect nostalgically, they are representatively intensifying the social bonds between themselves and the people they remember in their nostalgic experiences. In this way, those social bonds are strengthened regardless of the physical absence of those other people in the nostalgic experience. Nostalgia helps to generate supplementary significant bonds between people, which, as I mentioned above, are particularly useful during transitional periods in life and help to fight feelings of social segregation. Based on the social nature of nostalgia, Wildschut et al. (2006) theorized that nostalgia, strengthens social connectedness. Experiments have found evidence of this association. For instance, those who evoked and wrote about nostalgic occurrences showed better attachment and stronger interpersonal bonds than those who recalled an ordinary experience (Wildschut et Al., 2006). Sedikides and his colleagues (2004) anticipated that nostalgia may serve as a device that individuals can use to perceive life as significant. One of the challenge we have to face as humans is finding value and sense in our existence.
However, being aware of the imminent and unavoidable nature of death creates anxiety. In a nostalgic experience, significant facts from the past are brought to life and indirectly turn into one’s present. Nostalgia allows one to restore relations with significant others (Batcho 1998). Re-experiencing these social bonds through nostalgic thoughts helps accomplish one’s call for belongingness, as well as affording a sense of safety and security.
Additional confirmation of the social nature of nostalgia can be found in content of nostalgic narratives. Nostalgic episodes usually involve interactions between the self and close others, such as family members, friends, and romantic partners. These social exchanges occurred in the context of life events such as meetings, holidays, graduations, and weddings (Wildschut et al., 2006).
According to terror management theory, we face a powerful, paralyzing fear when thinking about death for extended periods of time (Pyszczynski et al., 1997). The theory then clarifies that people fight this existential danger in two ways; by holding to and having trust in a cultural worldview, and by preserving elevated levels of self esteem. These functions can be helped by nostalgia. As I wrote in the introduction, nostalgia can be thought as an instrumental emotion against fears and threats. In particular, fears and treats that rise as we grow older, as we age.
Recent experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of nostalgia in this regard. One of the most feared and salient threats is the fear of death in older people. Routledge and colleagues (2008) examined nostalgia as a defense against the threat of death awareness. Their results showed that nostalgia serves a broader meaning-providing function. In their experiment, it becomes clear the existential protection function of nostalgia. By embedding the individual in a meaningful life, nostalgia protects against fear.
And, those who scored higher in nostalgia saw life to be significant, and showed less access to death related thoughts. Moreover, experimentally induced nostalgia decreased death contemplation after death had become salient. For instance, Juhl and colleagues (2010) found that nostalgia prone subjects reacted less pessimistically to death-related stimuli than those who were not nostalgia prone. Individuals who scored lower in nostalgia proneness also experienced higher levels of death anxiety .
Nostalgia, can it be used in coaching to enhance sadness over a period of time?
Nostalgia is a multifaceted phenomena, whether someone either enjoys or suffers from nostalgic reminiscences. In the same way the consequences of nostalgia might depend on different aspects. For instance, a useful aspect when coaching a person out from a difficult moment is the ability to reshape even unpleasant events in a way that they can be remembered pleasantly (Stern, 1992). A coach pays a lot of attention at communication, and communicational styles have been discovered when e person talks about what has happened to him. In nostalgia, another issue is the one about redemption and contamination sequences. Some researchers have distinguished between these two strategies. In the first one (redemption), the story progresses from a bad or difficult situation to a good and positive one. As McAdams (2001) say: ”the Bad is redeemed, salvaged, mitigated, or made better in light of the ensuing good”. In the contamination form, the story goes from a good or uncomplicated life situation to a negative or complicated one. Quoting McAdams again:”the good is spoiled, ruined, contaminated, or undermined by what follows it”. These two ways of narrating the story, have notable emotional implications. In a redemption sequence, the resulting emotion is positive, as the individual becomes content, happy or ecstatic. In the opposite condition, the resulting emotion is negative, as the person feels sad, rejected or depressed.
So, affect after the nostalgic memory might depend on the content of the nostalgic memory itself, because as Wildschut et al. (2006) have shown, nostalgic narratives often deal with redemption sequences, which are positively associated to psychological well-being. Having found this, a coach could use nostalgia to try to reframe the experience of the client. The coach could try to ask the client to remember a nostalgic memory and try to model the negative experience the client is moaning about. An example could be : the client moans about the last fight with his wife. Then the coach could ask to remember something not so pleasant about an episode in the past. Something that once was a annoying but that he know remembers with nostalgia. It can be something like the way his granddad used to make fun of him, or the bad taste of something he had to eat. Something that in the past was not so pleasant, but now he remembers with nostalgia. By listening to how the client describes the bittersweet moment, the coach could understand what the schema of the memory is and then propose the recent episode (the fight) using the same frame and indirectly suggesting that in the future this episode that now seems negative, could change its negativity into a more positive feeling. Furthermore, Konno and Yoshikawa (2008) pointed to individual dissimilarities as they found that people may demonstrate either a harmonized or a bipolar type of nostalgia. The former type is characterized by experiencing optimistic and negative affect alike, the last by focusing on positive affect and suppressing negative effect, so that only the bipolar type might be associated with positive features of nostalgia.
Another idea introduced by Konno and Yoshikawa (2008) is that being in a sort of mind harmony, improves the positive consequences of nostalgic occurrences. It might be that nostalgia usually evokes more positive affect when somebody feels in harmony with him/herself.