Nostalgia

Positive clinical psychology is concerned with balancing positivity and negativity in human experience and clinical treatment. This chapter focuses on the emotion of nostalgia, which is inherently positive and negative, and its implications for psychological health. It explains four sources of empirical support for ambivalence: lay conceptions of nostalgia, content analysis of nostalgic narratives, comparisons of experimentally-induced nostalgic and ordinary autobiographical memories, and juxtaposition of positive and negative events in nostalgic narratives. The chapter discusses depictions of bittersweetness or ambivalence in lay definitions of nostalgia, in narrations of nostalgic experiences, and in its affective signature. It also considers three classes of nostalgia's psychological health benefits, namely social, self-related, and existential. The chapter then establishes a speculative link between nostalgic ambivalence and the health benefits that the emotion confers. Finally, it conceptualizes nostalgia as a resource that can be implemented to cope with distress.