Nostalgia: The Emotion of Connection

© Richard Bolstad, 2026

Emotions as Signals, and the Power of Nostalgia

Uncomfortable emotions, as Virginia Satir often said, are like the little red lights on a car dashboard. They are alerts that tell you what needs filling up (water, gas, electricity etc). In the brain these alerts are triggered by the amygdala, which actually refers to two small almond shaped organs, one on each side of the central brain. In general, the amygdala on the left focuses on things you want to move towards: cravings like hunger and need for touch, things you are excited to experience again, and (oddly, it might seem) things you feel proud of or even aggressive in defence of. The amygdala on the right focuses on things you want to move away from such as emotional and physical pain, fear and disgust.

The amygdalae (plural) have direct connections to the primary memory storage areas called the hippocampus (or hippocampi in plural). The left hippocampus keeps track of somewhat more logical memory information (how much distance between two memories, the kind of “time coding” or timeline system, what words you use to categorise memories etc). The right hippocampus keeps overall spatial-visual memories – records of where you were and what you experienced there.

Above the amygdala is another area important to triggering the amygdala responses. The “Ventromedial Prefrontal cortex” is the bit of the brain in front, right behind the eyes (though not directly connected to them). It weighs cost and benefits of each experience, including working out what other people might be about to do for better or worse. It prioritises based on an assessment of the “values” of moving towards or away from something, and feeds that information to the amygdalae to alert you by way of emotions. If it thinks it would work better for you to calm down, to some extent it can calm the amygdala’s alert system, so you make better choices. Obviously, the more you use this cortex (outer) area, the better able it is to manage your emotions so you actually get what you want, rather than making “knee-jerk” responses.

So anger signals that your needs are not being met, fear signals that you need to be careful, pain signals that you need to move away to something more comfortable, sadness signals that you have lost something important, excitement signals that something really positive might happen, hunger signals that you need food. The question that began the research I plan to guide you through here is: what does the emotion of “Nostalgia” act as a signal for us to do?

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for a past time, has both uncomfortable and pleasant qualities – people in many cultures call it “bitter-sweet”. Since by definition it involves remembering pleasant times from the past, it seems past oriented and positive. In fact, the primary Japanese word for nostalgia is Natsukashii (懐かしい). Unlike the English concept of nostalgia, which people often describe as almost a kind of sadness that we are best to avoid, natsukashii describes a warm, joyful longing for the past. It is used when an experience, smell, or song brings back fond memories, accompanied by a smile.

Strangely, when we observe people experiencing nostalgia, they often begin in “away from” right amygdala activation (sadness) and end up in left amygdala based inspiration. “Negative affective states such as sadness, loneliness, and meaninglessness trigger nostalgia and nostalgia, in turn, enhances well-being, feelings of social connectedness, and perceptions of meaning in life.” (FioRito and Routledge, 2020). Nostalgia is thus a bridge between the hemispheres of the brain, and a path out of sadness. The events people recall with nostalgia are not random past events: they are events filled with a sense of social connection and personal meaningfulness. Just as hunger signals that we need food, nostalgia signals that we need meaningfulness and connection in our lives. And it finds that connection in the last place we left it – in the past memories of happy events.

The aim of nostalgia, then is to inspire us to find new meanings and social connections. It alerts us to crucial and extremely human values that we have neglected, and which are as essential as food. Paradoxically, then, the effect of nostalgia is to shift us to thinking about what we want in our future. “Nostalgia increases general well-being (Routledge et al., 2013) but also positively impacts motivation-relevant affect. For instance, nostalgia increases optimism (Cheung et al., 2013, 2016) inspiration (Stephan et al., 2015) social efficacy (Abeyta et al., 2015) and feelings of purpose in life (Routledge et al., 2011). In addition, as people get older, nostalgia makes them feel youthful and more optimistic about their health (Abeyta and Routledge, 2016). People’s written accounts of nostalgic memories also frequently contain themes of appreciation for both the past and hopefulness for the future (Routledge, 2015). In short, nostalgia promotes the types of affective states that mobilize the self for action.” (FioRito and Routledge, 2020)

Deliberately Creating Positive Nostalgia

Many cultures have traditions of collecting souvenirs and memorabilia which connect the person to positive memories of events and places, or positive memories connecting them to a group, an organisation or even a whole time in history. In the last two centuries, collecting and looking through collections of photographs are perhaps the most common example of such nostalgia enhancing activities. Auditorily, collections of songs and music perform a similar function, and arguably kinaesthetically, ritualistic behaviours such as bringing flowers to a cemetery or lighting candles or incense in a place of worship perform a similar function. In Japan, for example, gathering annually to observe cherry blossoms is a powerful nostalgic trigger performed en-masse as a social ritual.

Over the last half century, researchers have experimentally induced nostalgia and observed some remarkable results. In one study in 1979, organised by Ellen Langer, a group of elderly men lived together on a retreat as if they were living back in 1959 (twenty years earlier, when they were all younger and fitter). They had newspapers from 20 years earlier delivered each day, they watched TV programs and movies from 1959, and they listened to radio programs from twenty years earlier. All objects invented since 1959 were removed from their environment. They were encouraged to talk as if the current events in the newspapers were actually happening now. A control group lived a normal 1979 life in a separate house and met each day simply to discuss the 1950s, as a past tense experience. “For both groups, hearing, memory and grip strength improved. Photos of participants were rated as appearing significantly younger after the retreat than before. In addition to these, there were further improvements for the experimental group on measures of vision, joint flexibility, manual dexterity, IQ, gait, posture and decreased symptoms of arthritis. Despite improvements in both groups, nevertheless, the experimental group outperformed the comparison in all these tasks.” (Pagnini et alia, 2019). In a single week, these men reduced their signs of aging by an average of ten years! Abeyta (2016) describes this effect of nostalgia as a psychological “fountain of youth”.

Betty Alice Erickson explains how her father, the psychotherapist Milton H. Erickson, recovered from paralysis caused by polio, by remembering in detail how he used to move his body and what it felt like to have that flexibility. “Daddy spent a year bedfast, paralyzed with polio, and had lots of time to think. … He began to move by practicing remembering how it felt to move his thumb and fingers together . . . and practicing that memory over and over until he actually saw a movement. He took off from there, with enormous dedication and even greater hard work.” (www.psychotherapy.net/perspectives/articles/12-things-you-didn-t-know-about-milton-h-erickson-and-his-daughter-betty-alice-erickson/ )

Another Psychology researcher, Andrew Abeyta, created several small research studies to simulate the same response. “Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that, as people get older, nostalgic reverie relative to a control makes them feel more youthful. …. Nostalgia-induced youthfulness in turn predicted the extent to which participants felt healthy, confident about their physical abilities, and optimistic about their future health. These findings suggest that nostalgia promotes and younger view of the self that may be beneficial for health…. Beyond subjective health and coping, a youthful view of the self is associated with objective indicators of health above and beyond chronological age and other risk factors. For example, research by Y. Stephan, Sutin, and Terracciano, (2015) found that, even after controlling for health risk factors like smoking and body mass index, feeling younger was associated with a lower levels of C-reactive protein, a marker of systemic inflammation that has been linked to increased risk for disease.” (Abeyta, 2016).

Anticipated Nostalgia. Appreciating the Present.

The days are gone when NLP processes such as Time Line Therapy® Techniques were considered fringe by Psychology researchers. British Psychologist Wing-Yee Cheung explains Anticipated Nostalgia in exactly these terms. “Anticipated nostalgia is a form of mental time travel.The advances in neurological and cognitive investigations on mental time travel and memory formation provide a gateway into understanding how anticipated nostalgia may operate. Humans can project the self both backward in time and forward to the future, in the form of recollecting past events and anticipating or planning how future events may unfold. This ability applies to events referring not only to the self, but also to collectives. Mental time travel is theorized to have evolutionary roots. Further, the hippocampus is involved in both episodic memory and episodic future thinking: Individuals with impaired hippocampus (and in some cases, ventromedial pre-frontal cortex) find it difficult to recollect past events and imagine future ones.”

“Anticipated nostalgia” involves imaging a future self who will feel nostalgic about our current experiences. Note that this is a “dissociated” experience in NLP terms (seeing the future self separate from us). That distinguishes it from “anticipatory nostalgia”, where the person uncontrollably experiences a sense of sadness and loss by imagining themselves in a future event where they no longer have access to current pleasant experiences. This anticipatory nostalgia is a kind of grief.

Once again, anticipated nostalgia is not merely an experimental or hypothetical response, but is a normal part of life. People normally expect to feel nostalgia and deliberately collect references to aid them in the future re-enjoyment of positive experiences. “Specifically, when experiencing positive life events, individuals were more likely to feel anticipated nostalgia and also savour these experiences by engaging in activities that help preserve their memories (e.g. purchasing items with nostalgic potential, taking photographs). Such self-regulatory effort may bridge the gap between the actual and envisioned amount of time spent remembering personal experiences. Individuals overestimate how frequently they will remember positive experiences and underestimate the difficulty of bringing these experiences to mind when not being prompted (Tully & Meyvis, 2017). Given that anticipated nostalgia is associated with savouring in the anticipation of loss (e.g. acquiring keepsakes, taking photographs), it is likely to facilitate actual remembering and bring it in line with envisioned remembering.” (Cheung, 2022)

Cheung’s research shows that when people imagine looking back on this moment from a future time, they get a different perspective on this moment. They understand its preciousness more fully, feel more grateful for it, and identify the deeper values implicit in it more fully, especially the same sense of connection, agency (choosing what they are doing) and identity meaningfulness that normal nostalgia actually generates. Cheung’s research used the same scale that research on actual nostalgia uses, a standardised scale developed by Batcho (1995).

Anemoia: Nostalgia for Times That You Never Actually Lived In

Anemoia is an invented term for a phenomenon which has also always been there, in which humans have a sense of nostalgia for times that (as far as evidence can show) they never actually lived through. Cultural enactments of earlier events such as the founding of a city often generate this feeling, and individually people may fixate on a specific time and place in history that they “romanticise” and imagine what it would be like to live in. They may explain this as a memory of a “past life” or they may explain that the past was a better time than the one they are living in now, and they were simply “born out of time.”

Again, Psychologists recognise that to feel this feeling requires a unique form of “time travel”. Miskolczi (2025) explains “While nostalgia is tied to autobiographical memory, anemoia describes a form of psychological time travel or retroactive nostalgia (Boym, 2008; Sedikides et al., 2008), often directed at periods the individual has never lived through (Holbrook – Schindler, 2003). As a sum of the related concepts, anemoia can be defined as an imagined retrospection and often draws upon collective cultural memory. This includes aesthetic or symbolic references (e.g., VHS-style visuals, retro advertisements) that evoke the “feel” of a bygone era. The concept also reflects a deeper desire for the perceived simplicity, authenticity, and human-centeredness of “old times” – not as they truly were, but as they are culturally constructed and emotionally idealized.” Once again, notice that nostalgia is not random, however mysterious it may seem to observers: it recreates the feeling of a time of greater connection to other human beings, to our innate human sense of being creators of our life (agency) and to our sense that what we do has a deeper “meaningfulness”. People can be induced to pay extra money to get phones that look like century old phones, to buy dresses that look like 1950s dresses, or to have a house that looks like a reconstructed nineteenth century mansion. This is especially so, Miskolczi suggests, as people react against modern technology (in 2026 the best example being the reaction against AI generated material) paradoxically often using the new technology to recreate the old. Thus in 2026, social media filled with AI-faked images claiming to show the idealised life of children in the 1980s or hippies in the 1960s, along with wording saying that this was a time that will never come back and that was better and more “real” than the current era.

Once again, instead of viewing this as pathological fixation or escapism, it is important to notice that the nostalgia is an emotion signalling unmet needs. Anemoia helps people reconnect with what is really important for them internally, and the fact that the imagined world they recreate is often naively different to any epoch that actually existed, is merely a reminder that the aim is not to recreate something externally but to recontact a reality that lasts longer than any external changes and is emotionally more powerful than those changes.

Creating Therapeutic Nostalgia Based Rituals For Connection and Meaningfulness

In all these cases (“normal nostalgia”, anticipated nostalgia, and anemoia) we can see that these emotions are not new but have been actually intentionally utilized in all previous cultures to create community and meaningfulness. Far from being past oriented and disempowering, these emotional states are, in the research, future oriented and motivating in an extremely positive way, with dramatic psychological and physical benefits. The “Mid-Life Criterion Shift Weekend” is my personal project to collect such therapeutic activities together and utilize them to enable something that frequently happens naturally as people reach a transition point either individually or socially – to re-evaluate their life path, reconnect with their previous positive experiences, and get a renewed sense of continuity in their life based on deeper values that transcend the peripheral changes in their life. These processes re-anchor people in their own sense of agency and connection and meaningfulness at times of uncontrollable external change, either due to social upheavals, technological shifts, or natural aging milestones. This online training weekend, and the new therapeutic collection of NLP-style processes that it introduces, is explained at https://transformations.org.nz/mid-life/.

Bibliography

• Abeyta, Andrew A., and Simran Pillarisetty. “Nostalgia Supports a Meaningful Life.” Current Opinion in Psychology 49 (2023/02/01/ 2023): 101520. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101520.
• Abeyta, Andrew A., and Clay Routledge. “Fountain of Youth: The Impact of Nostalgia on Youthfulness and Implications for Health.” Self and Identity 15, no. 3 (2016/05/03 2016): 356-69. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2015.1133452.
• Cheung, Wing-Yee, Erica G. Hepper, Chelsea A. Reid, Jeffrey D. Green, Tim Wildschut, and Constantine Sedikides. “Anticipated Nostalgia: Looking Forward to Looking Back.” Cognition and Emotion 34, no. 3 (2020/04/02 2020): 511-25. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2019.1649247.
• FioRito, Taylor A., and Clay Routledge. “Is Nostalgia a Past or Future-Oriented Experience? Affective, Behavioral, Social Cognitive, and Neuroscientific Evidence.” [In English]. Opinion. Frontiers in Psychology Volume 11 – 2020 (2020-June-03 2020). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01133.
• Miskolczi, Márk. Born in the Wrong Era: Rethinking Human-Ai Relations through the Lens of Anemoia. 2025. doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-7234632/v1.
• “Batcho Nostalgia Inventory.” Psychological Scales & Instruments Database, Updated 2025/10/18, 2025, https://db.arabpsychology.com/scales/batcho-nostalgia-inventory/.
• Pagnini, F., C. Cavalera, E. Volpato, B. Comazzi, F. Vailati Riboni, C. Valota, K. Bercovitz, et al. “Ageing as a Mindset: A Study Protocol to Rejuvenate Older Adults with a Counterclockwise Psychological Intervention.” [In eng]. BMJ Open 9, no. 7 (Jul 9 2019): e030411. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2019-030411.