Reminiscing good old days: Nostalgia, Memory and Emotion
“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.” — Haruki Murakami
Have you ever been so sentimentally attached to certain moments in your life? Wishing you could go back to those time and fill your lungs with that emotion again. I bet I’m not the only one who wishes for it.
When some sensation could trigger you to a certain period of time. The smell of perfume reminds you of dating experience with someone in the past. Songs that remind you of the joy you feel when spending time with your best friends. Photograph of collected moments in high school. Movies that used to comfort you in childhood. A place you used to spend time the most. Or the weather that reminds you when traveling to someplace. It was weird that those sensation cues can travel you to another dimension of time.
Those nostalgic feelings which sometimes overwhelming, so intense that really preoccupy your mind. Nostalgia is ambivalent affect, it brings you content and sadness at the same time. It gives you warm yet melancholic reminiscence of memories in the past.
Humans have cognition which is designed to remember things and events that contain emotional relevance. We are likely to remember events or experiences that give us emotional remarks than the neutrals. For example, I still remember the songs I used to play when I was discouraged and demotivated. I still remember the experience of being ashamed by someone in public. Or walking in the park with someone I used to crush on, the feelings, the ambiance of the place, and the convo we had.
I remember it well because it induced emotional reaction when I was experienced it. It can be positive or negative emotion. And, more intense the emotion, the stronger I can recall those experiences. And by stronger, I mean the recollection of this memory is greater than unemotional memory. The picture just seems so vivid to me.
Our ability to remember this kind of memory — memory to recall personal experience in the past — is called autobiographical memory. A lot of cognitive research has identified this phenomenon of autobiographical memories correlate with emotion. Emotional memories also seem to be last longer. That’s why older people still remember the experiences of being in love for the first time, funny stories of their traveling experience, or being abused, rather than remember general knowledge such as when the last dinosaurs exist.
Then let’s back to nostalgia. Researchers Mills and Coleman (1994) define nostalgia as “the bittersweet recall of emotional past events.” Many researchers have defined nostalgia in many definitions and concepts. But basically, the concept is similar, which is contain affect (feelings) and cognitive dimension.
Nostalgia is blended positive and negative feelings. Quoting from Fridja (2007) nostalgia is indeed a true bittersweet emotion: pain because of pleasures past, or pleasure because of pleasures that have gone. The pleasure is not full; the pain not pungent.
It becomes plausible that our emotional memories in the past are recalled better than other memories. To a further extent, this attachment to past experiences just gives you melancholic feelings. It feels like glorious days were over, and you can’t back to that era again. You’re yearning and missing to go back to those times and realized it was the most unrealistic thing to happen.
Nostalgia can be healthy and unhealthy. It could be maladaptive because the prolonged melancholy can be a sign of adapting poorly to life changes or trauma. It is unhealthy if nostalgia can lead someone to be pessimistic to think the present and future won't be as good as the past. And sometimes, thinking we used to hang out with someone, might trigger us to feel lonely.
And of course, life is consists of two sides: good and bad, unhealthy and healthy. Nostalgia can be healthy because it has potential to serve therapeutic benefits. Research has shown that view of nostalgia as a role for maintaining connectedness with others, especially for the elderly.
The good sides of nostalgia for me are it evokes positive emotion such as content and heartwarming. Sometimes only by reminiscing good memories or recalling that I had passed the bad days makes me think “I did live up my life and seized the moments”. For those bad days when I cried a lot, I’m grateful they were over and I survived. For the good thing that happened in my life, I’m more grateful it adds color to my life. They gave me strength and power to live up my life to the fullest.
The question is, could we recreate the moment and feel the same feeling as the previous?
Sometimes I wish that I could return to the past and relive the moment again. Going back to the past is the most unrealistic and impossible, as we move on to the future. Even if we reconstruct past moment by gathering the same folks, in the same location and do the same thing we used to do, we don't live in the same dimension of time as those memories. And we are not the same person anymore. And by the facts which emotion is influenced by our psychological states, the feelings we would feel might be different.
But the good news is we can still induce the joy we used to feel back then. We can travel with the songs we used to listen to, watch the movies we always go back to, use the same smell of perfume when we were in that moment, cook and eat memorable meals, or simply look at the sky and stargazing. Time passes by and life goes on, but our memories still alive in our hearts.
Let’s live our life to the fullest, seize every moment and create new memories.
