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The influence of personality and coping style on the affective outcomes of nostalgia: Is nostalgia a healthy coping mechanism or rumination?
PAID-07749; No of Pages 6 Personality and Individual Differences xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
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The influence of personality and coping style on the affective outcomes of nostalgia: Is nostalgia a healthy coping mechanism or rumination? Sandra Garrido ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, and MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Australia
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 4 June 2015 Received in revised form 20 May 2016 Accepted 20 July 2016 Available online xxxx Keywords: Nostalgia Rumination Coping style Depression
a b s t r a c t Nostalgia is often described as a ‘bittersweet’ emotional experience. Scholars have argued persuasively as to its function as a means of coping with loneliness, meaninglessness and a negative mood, and its relationship with adaptive strategies for coping with adverse events or affective states. However, depression is strongly associated with rumination and a negative attentional bias. Previous research has not investigated the possibility that people with impaired capacities to effectively regulate moods, such as people with strong tendencies to rumination, may not obtain the same benefits from nostalgic remembering as more healthy people. This paper reports the results of two studies: a preliminary survey involving 213 participants and a second study in which 664 participants selfselected a piece of music that made them feel nostalgic. Results suggest that for people with tendencies to depression or maladaptive coping styles, nostalgic remembering may result in negative affective outcomes. It is argued that nostalgia can represent part of both adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies, depending on the personality and coping style of the individual. © 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
1. Introduction Nostalgia is a frequent experience in all cultures in young and old (Wildschut, Sedikides, Arndt, & Routledge, 2006). It is typically a bittersweet experience (Barrett et al., 2010), involving both a sense of loss and longing for the past, as well as happiness in recalling positive memories (Hepper, Ritchie, Sedikides, & Wildschut, 2012). Nostalgia can be triggered by feelings of loneliness and negative mood (Wildschut et al., 2006), a sense of meaninglessness (Routledge et al., 2011) and existential threat (Juhl, Routledge, Arndt, Sedikides, & Wildschut, 2010), suggesting that it is a resource that is accessed as a psychological buffer in times of distress. In fact, nostalgia has been shown to be positively correlated with adaptive coping strategies such as seeking emotional support and turning to religion (Batcho, 2013). Experimental studies have also demonstrated that engaging in nostalgic remembering increases positive affect and positive self-regard, heightens interpersonal connectivity (Wildschut et al., 2006) and results in a higher sense of personal meaning (Routledge et al., 2011). However, a distinction must be made between the use of nostalgia as a healthy coping mechanism and its effects in people with impaired capacities to regulate affect. Nostalgia-proneness has been found to be correlated with Neuroticism from the Big Five Personality Index (Barrett et al., 2010), a trait generally associated with a range of mental health disorders (Omel et al., 2013). In complicated grief, obsession
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with loss of the idealized past worsens depression (Nolen-Hoeksema, Parker, & Larson, 1994). An over-obsession with the past may also result in negative outcomes for migrants, leading to a failure to adjust to new surroundings, increased feelings of isolation, and other threats to psychological well-being (Lijtmaer, 2001; Zinchenko, 2011). Other studies similarly report differing outcomes of nostalgia. Sedikides, Wildschut, Gaertner, Routledge, and Arndt (2010), for example, found that nostalgia enabled a sense of self-continuity for happy but not unhappy persons. They thus argue that “when happiness is low, engaging in nostalgic reverie about the past may make the present seem particularly bleak by comparison” (p. 234). Verplanken (2012) observed that even though nostalgia initially resulted in an increase in positive affect, it ultimately increased anxiety and depression in habitual worriers. Other individual differences in the outcomes of nostalgic remembering have also been reported (Hart et al., 2011; Iyer & Jetten, 2011). These studies suggest that despite the potential psychological functions nostalgia can fill, it does not have a wholesale positive effect. Barrett et al. (2010) therefore proposed two distinctive nostalgiaprone personality profiles: the brooding, neurotic ruminator, and the individual whose thoughts about the past are more motivated by curiosity and wonder. These archetypes closely correspond to the two types of private self-attention described by Trapnell and Campbell (1999): rumination and reflectiveness, a distinction proposed as a solution to the ‘self-absorption paradox’: the fact that self-reflection can be both a healthy, adaptive behavior, and can be associated with neuroticism, depression and poor self-esteem. This seems to be a similar paradox to that found in the literature relating to nostalgia.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.07.021 0191-8869/© 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Please cite this article as: Garrido, S., The influence of personality and coping style on the affective outcomes of nostalgia: Is nostalgia a healthy coping mechanism or r..., Personality and Individual Differences (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.07.021
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S. Garrido / Personality and Individual Differences xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
Rumination is an involuntary focus on negative and pessimistic thoughts (Joorman, 2005). It is strongly predictive of depression (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991) and involves an attentional bias towards negative stimuli (Gotlib, Krasnoperova, Neubauer Yue, & Joormann, 2004), and a diminished motivation to do things that would reduce dysphoria and improve mood (Forbes & Dahl, 2005). Reflection, on the other hand, is a form of self-analysis that is highly adaptive and psychologically healthy. If nostalgia can be both adaptive and maladaptive depending on the individual's personality, thinking patterns and perspective, the distinction between rumination and reflection may be an effective way of further unraveling the ‘bittersweet’ effect of nostalgia. The aim of the studies reported herein is to contribute to an understanding of the psychological benefits (or otherwise) of nostalgia, by testing the relationship between nostalgia and coping styles such as rumination and reflection. 2. Study 1 This study was designed to firstly confirm whether a relationship exists between nostalgia and rumination since previous studies have not investigated this, and to further explore whether the relationship between nostalgia and depression could be mediated by rumination. 2.1. Hypotheses
H1. Rumination would be correlated with measures of Nostalgia Proneness H2. The relationship between Depression and Nostalgia Proneness would be mediated by Rumination. 2.2. Methods 2.2.1. Participants Two-hundred-and-thirteen undergraduate students from a university in Australia were given course credits for participation. Mean age of participants was 21.5 years, including 85 males and 128 females. 2.2.2. Procedures Participants completed an online survey consisting of three demographic questions and four question blocks with items grouped according to the scales described below. 2.2.3. Measures Nostalgia was measured using the Southampton Nostalgia Scale (SNS, Routledge, Arndt, Sedikides, & Wildschut, 2008) and Batcho's Nostalgia Inventory BNI (1995). The SNS asks participants to answer five questions relating to the frequency with which they experience nostalgia. Routledge et al. (2008) reported a reliability co-efficient of 0.92. In the current study a reliability coefficient of 0.74 was obtained (Cronbach's α). The BNI, on the other hand, measures the extent to which people miss things from when they were younger, rating 20 items on a 9-point scale (1 = not at all, 9 = very much). The scale is reported to have a split-half reliability of 0.78 and test-retest reliability over a 1-week interval of 0.84 (Batcho, 1995), and in the current study obtained a reliability co-efficient of 0.89 (Cronbach's α). The Rumination-Reflection Questionnaire (RRQ; Trapnell & Campbell, 1999), a 24-item questionnaire with reported internal consistency confirmed in the current study of 0.91 (Cronbach's α), was also used. Questions were answered using a 5-point scale (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree). The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI, Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & Erbaugh, 1961), a widely used scale to assess depression in both clinical and normative populations, was also included. A meta-analysis of reported internal consistency of the scale in
studies over a 25 year period revealed a mean coefficient alpha of 0.81 for non-clinical populations (Beck, Steer, & Garbin, 1988). In the current study a reliability coefficient of 0.86 was returned (Cronbach's α). 2.3. Results 2.3.1. Correlation analysis A Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to test for correlations between nostalgia, depression, rumination and reflection (Table 1). Rumination was correlated with both measures of nostalgia and with depression (BDI). While the BNI was strongly correlated with BDI, the SNS was not, suggesting that missing the past is more closely related to depression than is the frequency of nostalgic experiences. The SNS was correlated with reflectiveness, but the effect size was small. 2.3.2. Mediation model To test whether the relationship between nostalgia and rumination was mediated by rumination, bootstrapping methods outlined by Preacher and Hayes (2004), were used to test the model proposed in Fig. 1. Results based on 5000 bootstrapped samples confirmed the role of rumination in the relationship between nostalgia and depression, with an unstandardized indirect effect of B = 0.68 CI 0.33 to 1.21 (p b 0.05). The direct effect of nostalgia on depression, while still significant (B = 1.26, t(179) = 2.5, p = 0.01), dropped when controlling for rumination, indicating partial mediation. 2.4. Discussion These results demonstrate that the relationship between nostalgiaproneness and depression is partially mediated by rumination. While the analyses performed do not confirm a causal relationship, it illuminates the possibility that people with ruminative tendencies may tend to focus more on negative memories from the past, view the past in a more negative light, or compare the past more unfavorably with the present, thinking patterns that could conceivably exacerbate a depressed mood. This is in harmony with studies demonstrating that rumination is associated with negatively biased memory recall (Lyubomirsky, Caldwell, & Nolen-Hoeksema, 1998), and a general tendency to interpret other stimuli as negative (Raes, Hermans, & Williams, 2006). 3. Study 2 The results of the previous study suggested that rumination is involved in the relationship between nostalgia and depression. However, whether or not nostalgia functions so as to improve mood or to worsen it in the case of ruminators remains unclear. While previous studies have found that nostalgic remembering generally has positive affective results, it is possible that the bias towards negative thoughts inherent in rumination may lead to negative affective outcomes. Thus the second study aimed to investigate whether the affective outcome of nostalgia differed depending on rumination scores. Given the evident relationship between rumination and nostalgia, it was also thought likely that other coping styles may be involved in how Table 1 Pearson correlations between predictor variables in Study 1.
Rumination Reflectiveness Depression (BDI) BNI SNS
Depression (BDI)
BNI
SNS
0.402⁎⁎ 0.079
0.266⁎⁎ −0.043 0.317⁎⁎
0.283⁎⁎ 0.169⁎ 0.157⁎ 0.341⁎⁎
Note: ⁎ p b .05. ⁎⁎ p b .01.
Please cite this article as: Garrido, S., The influence of personality and coping style on the affective outcomes of nostalgia: Is nostalgia a healthy coping mechanism or r..., Personality and Individual Differences (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.07.021
S. Garrido / Personality and Individual Differences xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
people use nostalgia in times of psychological distress. In addition to rumination, other maladaptive coping styles can include avoidance, escape, and denial, while adaptive coping can take the form of problemsolving behaviours, seeking social support, or using humour, among other things (Carver, Scheier, & Weintraub, 1989; Thompson et al., 2010). Therefore, the relationship between other coping styles - both adaptive and maladaptive - and nostalgia were also considered in the second study. One difficulty with investigating the effect of nostalgia on ruminators is the low level of awareness that many people have of the actual effects of their behavior on mood. Studies suggest a tendency on the part of ruminators to rationalize ruminative behavior and to claim benefits from engaging in rumination despite the fact that it perpetuates dysphoria. For example, Barnhofer, Kuehn, de Jong-Meyer, and Williams (2006) reported that participants in their study believed that ruminating on past mistakes would help them to better understand their emotions and avoid making similar mistakes in the future. Similarly, participants in Watkins and Baracaia's (2001) study believed that they would benefit from the increase in self-awareness of rumination. However, the fact that rumination worsens or perpetuates a depressed mood is well established in the literature (Nolen-Hoeksema & Morrow, 1993). Several studies have reported a mismatch between actual mood outcomes of particular behavior and the self-perceived effects in the case of people with impaired mood regulatory capacities (Garrido & Schubert, 2015; McFerran, Garrido, & Saarikallio, 2013). One way to overcome this difficulty could be to use implicit measures of affective state. Implicit measures attempt to assess affective state indirectly, based on the assumption that participants unconsciously display information about their own affective state when engaging in other tasks such as rating the affective content of words. (Quirin, Kazen, & Kuhl, 2009), word-stem completion and word categorization (DeWall & Baumeister, 2007), or an examination of overall processing style (Ruys & Stapel, 2008). Such measures enable mood to be assessed without participant awareness so that results are not distorted either intentionally or by a lack of awareness of one's own affective state (Jostman, Koole, van der Wulp, & Fockenberg, 2006). Therefore, Study 2 aimed to test the affective outcomes of nostalgic remembering using both direct and implicit measures, as well as to explore further the influence of coping style and rumination. 3.1. Hypotheses
H1. Nostalgia (‘missing the past’) will be correlated with both adaptive and maladaptive coping styles. H2. Rumination will be a significant predictor of negative affective outcome after listening to nostalgic music. H3. Scores on implicit mood measures will suggest a greater negative affective outcome than direct questioning.
Fig. 1. Indirect effect of nostalgia on depression through rumination. Note: *p b 0.05, **p b 0.01, ***p b 0.001.
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3.2. Methods 3.2.1. Participants Participants were randomly recruited via a website hosted by the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) and promoted by various ABC radio stations and print media. A total of 715 participants were recruited with a mean age of 39.5 years (range 13–81), including 279 males and 405 females (31 did not answer the gender question).
3.2.2. Procedures Data was collected by means of an online survey over a period of 10 months. Embedded in the survey was a quasi-experimental question designed to induce feelings of nostalgia in participants while doing the survey. Experimental studies in nostalgia typically ask participants to recall an autobiographical event (Batcho, 2013; Iyer & Jetten, 2011). However, music has been found to be one of the most powerful triggers of nostalgia and was therefore chosen for the current study (Barrett et al., 2010; Zentner, Grandjean, & Scherer, 2008). Since music holds different autobiographical associations for individuals depending on the context in which they have heard it before, and since genre preferences can often confound studies of affective response to music (Schubert, 2007), it was not possible to play a single standardized stimuli to all participants. Rather, participants were asked to select a piece of music that personally makes them feel nostalgic. After providing the URL (such as for a YouTube video or last.fm page), participants were requested to watch the video or listen to the music they had selected. Participants were asked to complete the survey in one sitting and, as a compliance check, a time stamp feature in the survey software recorded the date and time that the survey was commenced and completed. Participants were also directly questioned about whether they had in fact listened to their selected music. Seven participants were omitted from further analysis for non-compliance, and forty-four for missing data (leaving a total of 664 participants).
3.2.3. Measures Prior to retrieving their self-selected nostalgic music, participants were asked whether they thought the music they were about to listen to would lift or lower their mood. They were also asked to indicate their current mood by selecting from a list of 7 moods plus an ‘other’ condition allowing participants to describe a mood that had not been listed. The moods selected by participants were assigned numerical values on dimensions of valence and arousal following Paltoglou and Thelwall's (2013) procedure for mapping discrete mood labels onto a 2-dimensional Cartesian space. After listening to their self-selected nostalgic music, participants were questioned about its effect using six items designed to gauge the positive and negative affective outcomes of the memories induced by the music, which also acted as a check of the degree to which nostalgia had been induced (see Table 2). The items were rated on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (stongly agree). Participants completed the BNI and RRQ used in Study 1. In addition, the Coping Orientations to Problems Experienced scale was included (COPE; Carver et al., 1989), containing subscales measuring both positive and negative coping styles. Reliability analyses returned coefficients of 0.77 or more (Chronbach's alpha) except for the Mental Disengagement subscale, which was omitted from subsequent analyses. An implicit measure of mood was also included after the nostalgic mood induction. The Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT; Quirin et al., 2009) is designed to indirectly assess positive and negative affect by asking participants to rate the extent to which words from an artificial language convey certain emotions. Scores are then aggregated to form positive and negative affect subscales. Reliability scores reported by the authors were 0.81 (Chronbach's alpha), and were 0.77 in the current study for the negative and positive affect subscales respectively.
Please cite this article as: Garrido, S., The influence of personality and coping style on the affective outcomes of nostalgia: Is nostalgia a healthy coping mechanism or r..., Personality and Individual Differences (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.07.021
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S. Garrido / Personality and Individual Differences xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
Table 2 Factor loading matrix for experienced effect of nostalgic music listening. “How did listening to this music make you feel?”
Item code
It made me happy to think about happy times in the past. It made me sad because those happy times I had in the past are gone. It made me appreciate where my life is now because I have come so far. It made me sad remembering difficult times in the past. It reminded me of people that I used to see more often and I enjoyed thinking about them and feeling more connected to them. The experience was bittersweet, somewhat happy and somewhat sad.
EEN1 −0.21
0.85
EEN2 0.79
0.11
EEN3 0.08
0.68
EEN4 0.81
−0.16
EEN5 0.44
0.57
EEN6 0.82
0.11
Negative Positive effect effect
3.3. Results 3.3.1. EEN A factor analysis was conducted on the EEN items. The loadings for a two-factor solution with varimax rotation are shown in Table 2. This solution explained 37% of the variance in responses. As expected, items loaded clearly onto two factors with 3 items most strongly loading on a positive effect factor and 3 items loading strongly on a negative effect factor. Two subscales were thus created using the highest loading items from each factor. Reliability analysis of these subscales returned a coefficient of 0.51 for the positive effect subscale (EENPos) and 0.75 for the negative effect subscale (EENNeg) (Chronbach's alpha). The positive effect subscale was therefore omitted from subsequent analyses.
3.3.2. Correlation analysis A Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to test the relationship between scale scores. The BNI was positively correlated with both positive and negative coping styles on the COPE (Table 3). The BNI was also correlated with rumination, and with a negative affective outcome from listening to the nostalgic music (EENNeg). EENNeg was correlated with
Table 3 Pearson correlation coefficients between predictor variables in Study 2.
BNI Rumination COPE subscales 1. Positive reinterpretation 2. Focus on & venting emotions 3. Instrumental social support 4. Active coping 5. Denial 6. Religious coping 7. Humour 8. Behavioural disengagement 9. Restraint 10. Emotional social support 11. Substance use 12. Acceptance 13. Suppressing activity 14. Planning Note: ⁎ p b 0.05. ⁎⁎ p b 0.001.
EEN neg
BNI
Rumination IPANAT positive
IPANAT negative
0.26⁎⁎ 0.27⁎⁎
1 0.18⁎
0.18⁎ 1
0.09⁎ 0.17⁎
0.12⁎ 0.11
−0.07
0.08
−0.26⁎⁎
0.07
−0.01
0.19⁎
0.37⁎⁎
0.40⁎⁎
0.20⁎
0.08
0.07
0.25⁎⁎
0.16⁎
0.13
0.03
−0.20⁎ 0.24⁎⁎ 0.05 −0.02 0.21⁎
−0.07 −0.25⁎⁎ 0.18⁎ 0.33⁎⁎ 0.36⁎⁎ 0.11 −0.01 −0.05 0.28⁎⁎ 0.31⁎⁎
−0.17⁎ 0.12 19⁎ 0.03 0.12
−0.13 0.08 0.09 0.04 0.12
0.02 0.04
0.20⁎ 0.24⁎⁎
−.0.04 0.21⁎⁎
0.05 0.21⁎⁎
0.09 0.08
0.05 0.08 0.05
0.08 0.24⁎⁎ 0.12
0.18⁎ −0.22⁎⁎ −0.01
−0.01 0.06 −0.05
−0.01 0.06 −0.03
−0.07
0.02
−0.01
−0.08
0.01
Rumination, Denial, and Behavioural Disengagement, and negatively correlated with the adaptive coping style of Active coping. These correlation results give a preliminary indication that nostalgia can be associated with both positive and negative coping styles as suggested in the first hypothesis, but that a negative affective outcome may be more likely in the case of people with maladaptive coping styles such as rumination as suggested in the second hypothesis. This was further tested in the subsequent analyses. 3.3.3. Mood effects The majority of participants reported being in a positive mood prior to music listening (n = 497). For most, nostalgic music listening resulted in greater positive than negative effects on mood, with only 84 people reporting a predominantly negative affective impact. The implicit mood measure (IPANAT) indicated the presence of a higher frequency of negative affective outcomes from the nostalgic music listening (n = 209) than the direct questions (EEN) as hypothesized (H3), suggesting some disconnect between self-perceived and actual affective outcomes. Rumination and COPE subscales as well as prior mood valence and arousal scores were regressed onto the EENNeg using OLS stepwise regression. Seven variables were retained in the final model (with criterion of F to enter b0.05 and probability of F to remove N0.10) (Table 4). Adjusted R2 for the model was 0.21. The model indicates that a negative affective outcome from listening to nostalgic music is predicted by maladaptive coping styles including Rumination, as hypothesized (H1), and is inversely related to the adaptive coping style of active coping and to being in a positive mood prior to the music listening. 3.4. Discussion It was hypothesized that nostalgia (‘missing the past’) would be associated with both adaptive and maladaptive coping styles and that rumination in particular would be revealed as a predictor of negative mood effect from the nostalgic music listening. These hypotheses were supported. These results, in part, replicate those of Batcho (2013). Positive correlations were found between the BNI and the same COPE subscales reported by Batcho. However, it is arguable that some of the coping styles that Batcho calls adaptive, could actually be maladaptive. For example, the COPE subscale that Batcho calls “expressing emotions”, is called “focus on and venting of emotions” by the authors of the scale (Carver et al., 1989). The items within that subscale cover two aspects of emotion-focused coping: a focus on emotions akin to rumination, and the venting of it, a more cathartic experience. It may be that these two aspects should in fact be examined separately in future studies. In general, however, emotion-focused coping is believed to be less helpful than active coping styles (Li, DiGiuseppe, & Froh, 2006). Similarly, the COPE subscale that Batcho calls “suppression of competing activity” appears to be the “behavioural disengagement” subscale as it is described by the authors of the COPE, who describe both this subscale and “focus on and venting of emotions” as “less useful” coping strategies (Carver et al., 1989, p. 267).
Table 4 Predictors for multiple regression model of negative effect of listening to nostalgic music. Dependent
B
SE
(Constant) Missing the past (BNI) Denial Active coping Prior mood valence Focus on and venting emotion Behavioural disengagement Rumination
7.9 1.1 0.3 −0.1 −1.4 0.1 −0.4 0.6
0.9 0.2 0.0 0.0 0.3 0.0 0.1 0.2
Beta
T
Sig.
0.3 0.4 −0.1 −0.2 0.2 −0.3 0.1
8.6 6.7 6.7 −2.3 −4.4 3.6 −6.1 3.5
0.000 0.000 0.000 0.023 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.001
Notes: B denotes unstandardized coefficients. Beta denotes standardized coefficients. SE denotes standard error of Beta.
Please cite this article as: Garrido, S., The influence of personality and coping style on the affective outcomes of nostalgia: Is nostalgia a healthy coping mechanism or r..., Personality and Individual Differences (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.07.021
S. Garrido / Personality and Individual Differences xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
Adding to these results, correlations were also found between the BNI and Rumination, which has not been explored in previous studies. Rumination and other maladaptive coping styles were further found to be predictive of negative affective outcomes from listening to self-selected nostalgic music. These results suggest that while nostalgia may provide many positive psychological benefits including an improved mood to the majority of people, where individuals tend towards maladaptive coping styles, the outcome of nostalgic episodes may be less positive. These results are in harmony with other studies cited above which confirm the idea that nostalgia does not have a positive effect on all people. It was also hypothesized that implicit mood measures would reveal a greater level of negative affective outcomes than direct questioning. This hypothesis was also supported, suggesting that, as in other studies relating to maladaptive behavior, participants are either not aware of actual mood effects, or tend to rationalize their maladaptive behavior (e.g. Barnhofer et al., 2006; Garrido & Schubert, 2015). Thus future studies may benefit from exploring further the usefulness of indirect or implicit mood measures.
4. Conclusions Previous studies have established that people in a depressed mood are strongly attracted to nostalgic remembering and that engaging in it increases positive affect. The current studies tend to confirm these findings, with the majority of participants demonstrating positive affective outcomes in both self-perceived effects of listening to nostalgic music and in implicit mood measures. However, the results also demonstrate that this is not true of all people. The first study found that rumination was a mediator between depression and nostalgia. Where there are tendencies to clinical depression, nostalgic remembering may tend to exacerbate patterns of negative thinking resulting in less positive affective outcomes. Nostalgia may also form part of other maladaptive coping strategies, by providing further escape from present reality by people with high scores in Denial, for example. These results indicate that individuals prone to unhealthy thought patterns may not experience the same benefits from remembering the past that other people do, despite what they report. It may be that although the immediate effect of remembering happy episodes in the past is enjoyable, the dichotomy between the perceived ideal of the past and the reality of the present may ultimately result in increased depression or anxiety (Verplanken, 2012). Whether the nostalgic episode results in an experience of positive or negative emotions may greatly depend on the individual's habitual way of viewing the past, rather than the frequency with which they indulge in nostalgia. Future research should further investigate this distinction. Thus, this study has provided an important insight into the ambivalence that surrounds the topic of nostalgia. The current studies are limited by being reliant on self-report measures. Further study is required to test these findings in experimental settings, taking care to distinguish between immediate and long-term effects of nostalgia on mood and mental health. The distinction between the self-perceived and actual outcome should also be examined, with triangulation of self-report with other outcome measures including physiological measures. Since nostalgia is such a pervasive emotion in the human experience, being triggered by music, films, sights and smells, such studies would add greatly to an understanding of how engaging with the past contributes to daily life.
Acknowledgements This study was completed as part of a post-doctoral fellowship funded by the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.
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The influence of personality and coping style on the affective outcomes of nostalgia: Is nostalgia a healthy coping mechanism or rumination? Sandra Garrido ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, and MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Australia
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 4 June 2015 Received in revised form 20 May 2016 Accepted 20 July 2016 Available online xxxx Keywords: Nostalgia Rumination Coping style Depression
a b s t r a c t Nostalgia is often described as a ‘bittersweet’ emotional experience. Scholars have argued persuasively as to its function as a means of coping with loneliness, meaninglessness and a negative mood, and its relationship with adaptive strategies for coping with adverse events or affective states. However, depression is strongly associated with rumination and a negative attentional bias. Previous research has not investigated the possibility that people with impaired capacities to effectively regulate moods, such as people with strong tendencies to rumination, may not obtain the same benefits from nostalgic remembering as more healthy people. This paper reports the results of two studies: a preliminary survey involving 213 participants and a second study in which 664 participants selfselected a piece of music that made them feel nostalgic. Results suggest that for people with tendencies to depression or maladaptive coping styles, nostalgic remembering may result in negative affective outcomes. It is argued that nostalgia can represent part of both adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies, depending on the personality and coping style of the individual. © 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
1. Introduction Nostalgia is a frequent experience in all cultures in young and old (Wildschut, Sedikides, Arndt, & Routledge, 2006). It is typically a bittersweet experience (Barrett et al., 2010), involving both a sense of loss and longing for the past, as well as happiness in recalling positive memories (Hepper, Ritchie, Sedikides, & Wildschut, 2012). Nostalgia can be triggered by feelings of loneliness and negative mood (Wildschut et al., 2006), a sense of meaninglessness (Routledge et al., 2011) and existential threat (Juhl, Routledge, Arndt, Sedikides, & Wildschut, 2010), suggesting that it is a resource that is accessed as a psychological buffer in times of distress. In fact, nostalgia has been shown to be positively correlated with adaptive coping strategies such as seeking emotional support and turning to religion (Batcho, 2013). Experimental studies have also demonstrated that engaging in nostalgic remembering increases positive affect and positive self-regard, heightens interpersonal connectivity (Wildschut et al., 2006) and results in a higher sense of personal meaning (Routledge et al., 2011). However, a distinction must be made between the use of nostalgia as a healthy coping mechanism and its effects in people with impaired capacities to regulate affect. Nostalgia-proneness has been found to be correlated with Neuroticism from the Big Five Personality Index (Barrett et al., 2010), a trait generally associated with a range of mental health disorders (Omel et al., 2013). In complicated grief, obsession
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with loss of the idealized past worsens depression (Nolen-Hoeksema, Parker, & Larson, 1994). An over-obsession with the past may also result in negative outcomes for migrants, leading to a failure to adjust to new surroundings, increased feelings of isolation, and other threats to psychological well-being (Lijtmaer, 2001; Zinchenko, 2011). Other studies similarly report differing outcomes of nostalgia. Sedikides, Wildschut, Gaertner, Routledge, and Arndt (2010), for example, found that nostalgia enabled a sense of self-continuity for happy but not unhappy persons. They thus argue that “when happiness is low, engaging in nostalgic reverie about the past may make the present seem particularly bleak by comparison” (p. 234). Verplanken (2012) observed that even though nostalgia initially resulted in an increase in positive affect, it ultimately increased anxiety and depression in habitual worriers. Other individual differences in the outcomes of nostalgic remembering have also been reported (Hart et al., 2011; Iyer & Jetten, 2011). These studies suggest that despite the potential psychological functions nostalgia can fill, it does not have a wholesale positive effect. Barrett et al. (2010) therefore proposed two distinctive nostalgiaprone personality profiles: the brooding, neurotic ruminator, and the individual whose thoughts about the past are more motivated by curiosity and wonder. These archetypes closely correspond to the two types of private self-attention described by Trapnell and Campbell (1999): rumination and reflectiveness, a distinction proposed as a solution to the ‘self-absorption paradox’: the fact that self-reflection can be both a healthy, adaptive behavior, and can be associated with neuroticism, depression and poor self-esteem. This seems to be a similar paradox to that found in the literature relating to nostalgia.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.07.021 0191-8869/© 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Please cite this article as: Garrido, S., The influence of personality and coping style on the affective outcomes of nostalgia: Is nostalgia a healthy coping mechanism or r..., Personality and Individual Differences (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.07.021
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Rumination is an involuntary focus on negative and pessimistic thoughts (Joorman, 2005). It is strongly predictive of depression (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991) and involves an attentional bias towards negative stimuli (Gotlib, Krasnoperova, Neubauer Yue, & Joormann, 2004), and a diminished motivation to do things that would reduce dysphoria and improve mood (Forbes & Dahl, 2005). Reflection, on the other hand, is a form of self-analysis that is highly adaptive and psychologically healthy. If nostalgia can be both adaptive and maladaptive depending on the individual's personality, thinking patterns and perspective, the distinction between rumination and reflection may be an effective way of further unraveling the ‘bittersweet’ effect of nostalgia. The aim of the studies reported herein is to contribute to an understanding of the psychological benefits (or otherwise) of nostalgia, by testing the relationship between nostalgia and coping styles such as rumination and reflection. 2. Study 1 This study was designed to firstly confirm whether a relationship exists between nostalgia and rumination since previous studies have not investigated this, and to further explore whether the relationship between nostalgia and depression could be mediated by rumination. 2.1. Hypotheses
H1. Rumination would be correlated with measures of Nostalgia Proneness H2. The relationship between Depression and Nostalgia Proneness would be mediated by Rumination. 2.2. Methods 2.2.1. Participants Two-hundred-and-thirteen undergraduate students from a university in Australia were given course credits for participation. Mean age of participants was 21.5 years, including 85 males and 128 females. 2.2.2. Procedures Participants completed an online survey consisting of three demographic questions and four question blocks with items grouped according to the scales described below. 2.2.3. Measures Nostalgia was measured using the Southampton Nostalgia Scale (SNS, Routledge, Arndt, Sedikides, & Wildschut, 2008) and Batcho's Nostalgia Inventory BNI (1995). The SNS asks participants to answer five questions relating to the frequency with which they experience nostalgia. Routledge et al. (2008) reported a reliability co-efficient of 0.92. In the current study a reliability coefficient of 0.74 was obtained (Cronbach's α). The BNI, on the other hand, measures the extent to which people miss things from when they were younger, rating 20 items on a 9-point scale (1 = not at all, 9 = very much). The scale is reported to have a split-half reliability of 0.78 and test-retest reliability over a 1-week interval of 0.84 (Batcho, 1995), and in the current study obtained a reliability co-efficient of 0.89 (Cronbach's α). The Rumination-Reflection Questionnaire (RRQ; Trapnell & Campbell, 1999), a 24-item questionnaire with reported internal consistency confirmed in the current study of 0.91 (Cronbach's α), was also used. Questions were answered using a 5-point scale (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree). The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI, Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & Erbaugh, 1961), a widely used scale to assess depression in both clinical and normative populations, was also included. A meta-analysis of reported internal consistency of the scale in
studies over a 25 year period revealed a mean coefficient alpha of 0.81 for non-clinical populations (Beck, Steer, & Garbin, 1988). In the current study a reliability coefficient of 0.86 was returned (Cronbach's α). 2.3. Results 2.3.1. Correlation analysis A Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to test for correlations between nostalgia, depression, rumination and reflection (Table 1). Rumination was correlated with both measures of nostalgia and with depression (BDI). While the BNI was strongly correlated with BDI, the SNS was not, suggesting that missing the past is more closely related to depression than is the frequency of nostalgic experiences. The SNS was correlated with reflectiveness, but the effect size was small. 2.3.2. Mediation model To test whether the relationship between nostalgia and rumination was mediated by rumination, bootstrapping methods outlined by Preacher and Hayes (2004), were used to test the model proposed in Fig. 1. Results based on 5000 bootstrapped samples confirmed the role of rumination in the relationship between nostalgia and depression, with an unstandardized indirect effect of B = 0.68 CI 0.33 to 1.21 (p b 0.05). The direct effect of nostalgia on depression, while still significant (B = 1.26, t(179) = 2.5, p = 0.01), dropped when controlling for rumination, indicating partial mediation. 2.4. Discussion These results demonstrate that the relationship between nostalgiaproneness and depression is partially mediated by rumination. While the analyses performed do not confirm a causal relationship, it illuminates the possibility that people with ruminative tendencies may tend to focus more on negative memories from the past, view the past in a more negative light, or compare the past more unfavorably with the present, thinking patterns that could conceivably exacerbate a depressed mood. This is in harmony with studies demonstrating that rumination is associated with negatively biased memory recall (Lyubomirsky, Caldwell, & Nolen-Hoeksema, 1998), and a general tendency to interpret other stimuli as negative (Raes, Hermans, & Williams, 2006). 3. Study 2 The results of the previous study suggested that rumination is involved in the relationship between nostalgia and depression. However, whether or not nostalgia functions so as to improve mood or to worsen it in the case of ruminators remains unclear. While previous studies have found that nostalgic remembering generally has positive affective results, it is possible that the bias towards negative thoughts inherent in rumination may lead to negative affective outcomes. Thus the second study aimed to investigate whether the affective outcome of nostalgia differed depending on rumination scores. Given the evident relationship between rumination and nostalgia, it was also thought likely that other coping styles may be involved in how Table 1 Pearson correlations between predictor variables in Study 1.
Rumination Reflectiveness Depression (BDI) BNI SNS
Depression (BDI)
BNI
SNS
0.402⁎⁎ 0.079
0.266⁎⁎ −0.043 0.317⁎⁎
0.283⁎⁎ 0.169⁎ 0.157⁎ 0.341⁎⁎
Note: ⁎ p b .05. ⁎⁎ p b .01.
Please cite this article as: Garrido, S., The influence of personality and coping style on the affective outcomes of nostalgia: Is nostalgia a healthy coping mechanism or r..., Personality and Individual Differences (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.07.021
S. Garrido / Personality and Individual Differences xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
people use nostalgia in times of psychological distress. In addition to rumination, other maladaptive coping styles can include avoidance, escape, and denial, while adaptive coping can take the form of problemsolving behaviours, seeking social support, or using humour, among other things (Carver, Scheier, & Weintraub, 1989; Thompson et al., 2010). Therefore, the relationship between other coping styles - both adaptive and maladaptive - and nostalgia were also considered in the second study. One difficulty with investigating the effect of nostalgia on ruminators is the low level of awareness that many people have of the actual effects of their behavior on mood. Studies suggest a tendency on the part of ruminators to rationalize ruminative behavior and to claim benefits from engaging in rumination despite the fact that it perpetuates dysphoria. For example, Barnhofer, Kuehn, de Jong-Meyer, and Williams (2006) reported that participants in their study believed that ruminating on past mistakes would help them to better understand their emotions and avoid making similar mistakes in the future. Similarly, participants in Watkins and Baracaia's (2001) study believed that they would benefit from the increase in self-awareness of rumination. However, the fact that rumination worsens or perpetuates a depressed mood is well established in the literature (Nolen-Hoeksema & Morrow, 1993). Several studies have reported a mismatch between actual mood outcomes of particular behavior and the self-perceived effects in the case of people with impaired mood regulatory capacities (Garrido & Schubert, 2015; McFerran, Garrido, & Saarikallio, 2013). One way to overcome this difficulty could be to use implicit measures of affective state. Implicit measures attempt to assess affective state indirectly, based on the assumption that participants unconsciously display information about their own affective state when engaging in other tasks such as rating the affective content of words. (Quirin, Kazen, & Kuhl, 2009), word-stem completion and word categorization (DeWall & Baumeister, 2007), or an examination of overall processing style (Ruys & Stapel, 2008). Such measures enable mood to be assessed without participant awareness so that results are not distorted either intentionally or by a lack of awareness of one's own affective state (Jostman, Koole, van der Wulp, & Fockenberg, 2006). Therefore, Study 2 aimed to test the affective outcomes of nostalgic remembering using both direct and implicit measures, as well as to explore further the influence of coping style and rumination. 3.1. Hypotheses
H1. Nostalgia (‘missing the past’) will be correlated with both adaptive and maladaptive coping styles. H2. Rumination will be a significant predictor of negative affective outcome after listening to nostalgic music. H3. Scores on implicit mood measures will suggest a greater negative affective outcome than direct questioning.
Fig. 1. Indirect effect of nostalgia on depression through rumination. Note: *p b 0.05, **p b 0.01, ***p b 0.001.
3
3.2. Methods 3.2.1. Participants Participants were randomly recruited via a website hosted by the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) and promoted by various ABC radio stations and print media. A total of 715 participants were recruited with a mean age of 39.5 years (range 13–81), including 279 males and 405 females (31 did not answer the gender question).
3.2.2. Procedures Data was collected by means of an online survey over a period of 10 months. Embedded in the survey was a quasi-experimental question designed to induce feelings of nostalgia in participants while doing the survey. Experimental studies in nostalgia typically ask participants to recall an autobiographical event (Batcho, 2013; Iyer & Jetten, 2011). However, music has been found to be one of the most powerful triggers of nostalgia and was therefore chosen for the current study (Barrett et al., 2010; Zentner, Grandjean, & Scherer, 2008). Since music holds different autobiographical associations for individuals depending on the context in which they have heard it before, and since genre preferences can often confound studies of affective response to music (Schubert, 2007), it was not possible to play a single standardized stimuli to all participants. Rather, participants were asked to select a piece of music that personally makes them feel nostalgic. After providing the URL (such as for a YouTube video or last.fm page), participants were requested to watch the video or listen to the music they had selected. Participants were asked to complete the survey in one sitting and, as a compliance check, a time stamp feature in the survey software recorded the date and time that the survey was commenced and completed. Participants were also directly questioned about whether they had in fact listened to their selected music. Seven participants were omitted from further analysis for non-compliance, and forty-four for missing data (leaving a total of 664 participants).
3.2.3. Measures Prior to retrieving their self-selected nostalgic music, participants were asked whether they thought the music they were about to listen to would lift or lower their mood. They were also asked to indicate their current mood by selecting from a list of 7 moods plus an ‘other’ condition allowing participants to describe a mood that had not been listed. The moods selected by participants were assigned numerical values on dimensions of valence and arousal following Paltoglou and Thelwall's (2013) procedure for mapping discrete mood labels onto a 2-dimensional Cartesian space. After listening to their self-selected nostalgic music, participants were questioned about its effect using six items designed to gauge the positive and negative affective outcomes of the memories induced by the music, which also acted as a check of the degree to which nostalgia had been induced (see Table 2). The items were rated on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (stongly agree). Participants completed the BNI and RRQ used in Study 1. In addition, the Coping Orientations to Problems Experienced scale was included (COPE; Carver et al., 1989), containing subscales measuring both positive and negative coping styles. Reliability analyses returned coefficients of 0.77 or more (Chronbach's alpha) except for the Mental Disengagement subscale, which was omitted from subsequent analyses. An implicit measure of mood was also included after the nostalgic mood induction. The Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT; Quirin et al., 2009) is designed to indirectly assess positive and negative affect by asking participants to rate the extent to which words from an artificial language convey certain emotions. Scores are then aggregated to form positive and negative affect subscales. Reliability scores reported by the authors were 0.81 (Chronbach's alpha), and were 0.77 in the current study for the negative and positive affect subscales respectively.
Please cite this article as: Garrido, S., The influence of personality and coping style on the affective outcomes of nostalgia: Is nostalgia a healthy coping mechanism or r..., Personality and Individual Differences (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.07.021
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Table 2 Factor loading matrix for experienced effect of nostalgic music listening. “How did listening to this music make you feel?”
Item code
It made me happy to think about happy times in the past. It made me sad because those happy times I had in the past are gone. It made me appreciate where my life is now because I have come so far. It made me sad remembering difficult times in the past. It reminded me of people that I used to see more often and I enjoyed thinking about them and feeling more connected to them. The experience was bittersweet, somewhat happy and somewhat sad.
EEN1 −0.21
0.85
EEN2 0.79
0.11
EEN3 0.08
0.68
EEN4 0.81
−0.16
EEN5 0.44
0.57
EEN6 0.82
0.11
Negative Positive effect effect
3.3. Results 3.3.1. EEN A factor analysis was conducted on the EEN items. The loadings for a two-factor solution with varimax rotation are shown in Table 2. This solution explained 37% of the variance in responses. As expected, items loaded clearly onto two factors with 3 items most strongly loading on a positive effect factor and 3 items loading strongly on a negative effect factor. Two subscales were thus created using the highest loading items from each factor. Reliability analysis of these subscales returned a coefficient of 0.51 for the positive effect subscale (EENPos) and 0.75 for the negative effect subscale (EENNeg) (Chronbach's alpha). The positive effect subscale was therefore omitted from subsequent analyses.
3.3.2. Correlation analysis A Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to test the relationship between scale scores. The BNI was positively correlated with both positive and negative coping styles on the COPE (Table 3). The BNI was also correlated with rumination, and with a negative affective outcome from listening to the nostalgic music (EENNeg). EENNeg was correlated with
Table 3 Pearson correlation coefficients between predictor variables in Study 2.
BNI Rumination COPE subscales 1. Positive reinterpretation 2. Focus on & venting emotions 3. Instrumental social support 4. Active coping 5. Denial 6. Religious coping 7. Humour 8. Behavioural disengagement 9. Restraint 10. Emotional social support 11. Substance use 12. Acceptance 13. Suppressing activity 14. Planning Note: ⁎ p b 0.05. ⁎⁎ p b 0.001.
EEN neg
BNI
Rumination IPANAT positive
IPANAT negative
0.26⁎⁎ 0.27⁎⁎
1 0.18⁎
0.18⁎ 1
0.09⁎ 0.17⁎
0.12⁎ 0.11
−0.07
0.08
−0.26⁎⁎
0.07
−0.01
0.19⁎
0.37⁎⁎
0.40⁎⁎
0.20⁎
0.08
0.07
0.25⁎⁎
0.16⁎
0.13
0.03
−0.20⁎ 0.24⁎⁎ 0.05 −0.02 0.21⁎
−0.07 −0.25⁎⁎ 0.18⁎ 0.33⁎⁎ 0.36⁎⁎ 0.11 −0.01 −0.05 0.28⁎⁎ 0.31⁎⁎
−0.17⁎ 0.12 19⁎ 0.03 0.12
−0.13 0.08 0.09 0.04 0.12
0.02 0.04
0.20⁎ 0.24⁎⁎
−.0.04 0.21⁎⁎
0.05 0.21⁎⁎
0.09 0.08
0.05 0.08 0.05
0.08 0.24⁎⁎ 0.12
0.18⁎ −0.22⁎⁎ −0.01
−0.01 0.06 −0.05
−0.01 0.06 −0.03
−0.07
0.02
−0.01
−0.08
0.01
Rumination, Denial, and Behavioural Disengagement, and negatively correlated with the adaptive coping style of Active coping. These correlation results give a preliminary indication that nostalgia can be associated with both positive and negative coping styles as suggested in the first hypothesis, but that a negative affective outcome may be more likely in the case of people with maladaptive coping styles such as rumination as suggested in the second hypothesis. This was further tested in the subsequent analyses. 3.3.3. Mood effects The majority of participants reported being in a positive mood prior to music listening (n = 497). For most, nostalgic music listening resulted in greater positive than negative effects on mood, with only 84 people reporting a predominantly negative affective impact. The implicit mood measure (IPANAT) indicated the presence of a higher frequency of negative affective outcomes from the nostalgic music listening (n = 209) than the direct questions (EEN) as hypothesized (H3), suggesting some disconnect between self-perceived and actual affective outcomes. Rumination and COPE subscales as well as prior mood valence and arousal scores were regressed onto the EENNeg using OLS stepwise regression. Seven variables were retained in the final model (with criterion of F to enter b0.05 and probability of F to remove N0.10) (Table 4). Adjusted R2 for the model was 0.21. The model indicates that a negative affective outcome from listening to nostalgic music is predicted by maladaptive coping styles including Rumination, as hypothesized (H1), and is inversely related to the adaptive coping style of active coping and to being in a positive mood prior to the music listening. 3.4. Discussion It was hypothesized that nostalgia (‘missing the past’) would be associated with both adaptive and maladaptive coping styles and that rumination in particular would be revealed as a predictor of negative mood effect from the nostalgic music listening. These hypotheses were supported. These results, in part, replicate those of Batcho (2013). Positive correlations were found between the BNI and the same COPE subscales reported by Batcho. However, it is arguable that some of the coping styles that Batcho calls adaptive, could actually be maladaptive. For example, the COPE subscale that Batcho calls “expressing emotions”, is called “focus on and venting of emotions” by the authors of the scale (Carver et al., 1989). The items within that subscale cover two aspects of emotion-focused coping: a focus on emotions akin to rumination, and the venting of it, a more cathartic experience. It may be that these two aspects should in fact be examined separately in future studies. In general, however, emotion-focused coping is believed to be less helpful than active coping styles (Li, DiGiuseppe, & Froh, 2006). Similarly, the COPE subscale that Batcho calls “suppression of competing activity” appears to be the “behavioural disengagement” subscale as it is described by the authors of the COPE, who describe both this subscale and “focus on and venting of emotions” as “less useful” coping strategies (Carver et al., 1989, p. 267).
Table 4 Predictors for multiple regression model of negative effect of listening to nostalgic music. Dependent
B
SE
(Constant) Missing the past (BNI) Denial Active coping Prior mood valence Focus on and venting emotion Behavioural disengagement Rumination
7.9 1.1 0.3 −0.1 −1.4 0.1 −0.4 0.6
0.9 0.2 0.0 0.0 0.3 0.0 0.1 0.2
Beta
T
Sig.
0.3 0.4 −0.1 −0.2 0.2 −0.3 0.1
8.6 6.7 6.7 −2.3 −4.4 3.6 −6.1 3.5
0.000 0.000 0.000 0.023 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.001
Notes: B denotes unstandardized coefficients. Beta denotes standardized coefficients. SE denotes standard error of Beta.
Please cite this article as: Garrido, S., The influence of personality and coping style on the affective outcomes of nostalgia: Is nostalgia a healthy coping mechanism or r..., Personality and Individual Differences (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.07.021
S. Garrido / Personality and Individual Differences xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
Adding to these results, correlations were also found between the BNI and Rumination, which has not been explored in previous studies. Rumination and other maladaptive coping styles were further found to be predictive of negative affective outcomes from listening to self-selected nostalgic music. These results suggest that while nostalgia may provide many positive psychological benefits including an improved mood to the majority of people, where individuals tend towards maladaptive coping styles, the outcome of nostalgic episodes may be less positive. These results are in harmony with other studies cited above which confirm the idea that nostalgia does not have a positive effect on all people. It was also hypothesized that implicit mood measures would reveal a greater level of negative affective outcomes than direct questioning. This hypothesis was also supported, suggesting that, as in other studies relating to maladaptive behavior, participants are either not aware of actual mood effects, or tend to rationalize their maladaptive behavior (e.g. Barnhofer et al., 2006; Garrido & Schubert, 2015). Thus future studies may benefit from exploring further the usefulness of indirect or implicit mood measures.
4. Conclusions Previous studies have established that people in a depressed mood are strongly attracted to nostalgic remembering and that engaging in it increases positive affect. The current studies tend to confirm these findings, with the majority of participants demonstrating positive affective outcomes in both self-perceived effects of listening to nostalgic music and in implicit mood measures. However, the results also demonstrate that this is not true of all people. The first study found that rumination was a mediator between depression and nostalgia. Where there are tendencies to clinical depression, nostalgic remembering may tend to exacerbate patterns of negative thinking resulting in less positive affective outcomes. Nostalgia may also form part of other maladaptive coping strategies, by providing further escape from present reality by people with high scores in Denial, for example. These results indicate that individuals prone to unhealthy thought patterns may not experience the same benefits from remembering the past that other people do, despite what they report. It may be that although the immediate effect of remembering happy episodes in the past is enjoyable, the dichotomy between the perceived ideal of the past and the reality of the present may ultimately result in increased depression or anxiety (Verplanken, 2012). Whether the nostalgic episode results in an experience of positive or negative emotions may greatly depend on the individual's habitual way of viewing the past, rather than the frequency with which they indulge in nostalgia. Future research should further investigate this distinction. Thus, this study has provided an important insight into the ambivalence that surrounds the topic of nostalgia. The current studies are limited by being reliant on self-report measures. Further study is required to test these findings in experimental settings, taking care to distinguish between immediate and long-term effects of nostalgia on mood and mental health. The distinction between the self-perceived and actual outcome should also be examined, with triangulation of self-report with other outcome measures including physiological measures. Since nostalgia is such a pervasive emotion in the human experience, being triggered by music, films, sights and smells, such studies would add greatly to an understanding of how engaging with the past contributes to daily life.
Acknowledgements This study was completed as part of a post-doctoral fellowship funded by the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.
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Please cite this article as: Garrido, S., The influence of personality and coping style on the affective outcomes of nostalgia: Is nostalgia a healthy coping mechanism or r..., Personality and Individual Differences (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.07.021