One is an individual's personality or their psychological well-being in the first place. If you have two individuals one of whom is really happy in their current life and they're emotionally doing just fine. They might go back and remember bad things and then laugh about them and say wow we've come a long way since those days haven't, we. Now we have a big Thanksgiving feast and we have all this food. I remember being six years old not having enough to eat. Whereas someone else who is suffering from something like depression or an anxiety disorder. They might go back and think about the past and then let that further sadden them rather than make them happy by comparison with how far they've come.

Luna: That's really fascinating. One thing I do my touch a little bit more to like, why do we remember something so positively something so negatively? Because you say it might depend on the person's mental state, how they're doing in life. It's just so fascinating how we can look back on an experience and say, even if it was bad you can go back and look at an experience and focus on the positive aspects of it.

Batcho: Yes, exactly. That is fascinating. I think that there are at least two levels at which you can ask that question. One level is when someone is sitting in private just reminiscing. There it is very important to think about their current mood state. Because we have mood dependent memory effects. When you're sad, you're more likely to think of sad memories. When you're happy, you're more likely to think of happy memories. On the other level, we have a social element and establish it is a social experience. If you're hanging out with friends and reminiscing about the days back in high school or college or whatever. Now, depending upon what your friends say in that social setting that might trigger you to either be more positive or more negative. In a way, one really good piece of advice is for people who are starting to feel stressed out or lonely, or sad.

It's very important to try to gravitate toward people who stimulate the best of what you can bring to today from your past. In other words, if someone is always bringing you down by saying, "Do you remember when we didn't have enough to eat? Do you remember when somebody was unkind to us?" That person is an influence on our memory retrieval processes and we're more likely then to experience nostalgia in a negative way. On the other hand, if you're hanging out with people who are laughing about the funny times and the times when something embarrassing happened, everyone loves to share their most embarrassing moment. In that social setting when it's jovial and people are feeling good about it and finding the lessons learned from it. Now, that might bring out the best of nostalgic memory.

Luna: It's interesting that a lot of it is dependent upon humans around you. That's really interesting.

Batcho: Yes, it is. I think it's of great importance today because some of the current survey data have suggested that especially for the millennial generation and other adults, there is a great deal of reported loneliness. Some people suspect that has a little bit to do, not entirely but a little bit to do with the Internet or cyberspace and social media. The argument is there are 24 hours in a day. How do you spend those hours? People who grew up before the Internet their days were spent largely either alone or with other people face to face. That's no longer the case. We have an incredible amount of time spent in cyberspace. Even when you're connecting to other people in a social way, you're connecting to them at a distance. I believe that the psychological distancing can make people feel lonelier than they would have felt had they spent exactly the same amount of time having a cup of coffee with that person face to face. I think that the social element needs to be explored and researched even more heavily given the great proportion of time that young adults are spending, not in actual face to face, but in virtual reality.

Luna: Yes. There's so many throwbacks, if you will, happening today like I'm talking about the TV shows that are being rebooted or were popular in the '90s bands from long ago have reunited and are going out on tour. There's places like Buzzfeed often feature, top 20 lists like top 20 toys from the 1980s that sort of thing. People really flock to that and want to share their memories of certain toy. I was wondering from your perspective, what that tells us about people today. Is it really because of we're hyper-connected all the time or could it be people are more nostalgic today is that we have access to sharing these memories with a lot of people all at once through the internet?

Batcho: That is a complicated question and I think there are several reasons for the retro-phenomenon that has become somewhat of a fad. I think on one level it tells us based upon the research that there's something people feel is missing in the current lifestyle and that what is missing might be this social connectedness up close and personal. On the other hand, it might be that people are losing track of their sense of purpose and meaning and the nostalgia, one of its healthiest functions is to keep us on track with regard to the meaningfulness of our lives.

Data suggests that nostalgia facilitates our understanding of meaning in life and so in a way when we look at all the reboots and people going back to the past, it might be telling us that people aren't 100% satisfied with the current lifestyle. There's something that might be missing on a much more pragmatic, lower level. You might argue that a lot of this is because we can suddenly, it has become so accessible with social media. All it takes is for one person to post something from the past and raise a question. Judy, do you remember watching this old TV show or I wonder whatever happened to and before. What, it can go viral and we have the technology now to really immerse people in these reboots and then spin-offs, et cetera.

Until it stops making profit, I think we're going to see this for a while. I don't think it's going to continue on unabated, however.

Luna: Is there some element of infectiousness to nostalgia? I mean, we talked about obviously people have more access to seeing these things online and they can share it, but even people, if they're physically together, does it become something that spreads from one person to the other?

Batcho: I believe it can be actually. I wish it were more infectious. I'll tell you what I mean by that. I think is infectious when you have a group of people who have some shared experience. The best example of that are when a group of friends are reminiscing about their antics, the things they did as either teenagers or children or what have you. There it's a bonding experience. Another example of that is we know from current research that sports fans love to do that. They talk about the games that they enjoyed and when their team was victorious. When you have a common bond, it can be very infectious and it's like a domino one memory triggers another.

The reason why I say I wish it were more infectious is because that can break down when you have a group of people who do not have shared experiences to be nostalgic about. Suddenly if you have one individual wanting to reminisce about his or her own past experiences, but no one else in that group remembers those things or lived through those things. In, a long time ago people talked about generation gaps. Someone is talking about the 1950s a millennial says, Oh, I don't even know what you're talking about. I don't know that TV show.

I never saw that this can actually alienate other people because people don't necessarily want to hear about your nostalgic memories. They want to share their own. That's why I say I wish it were a little more open because we have so much to learn from one another's nostalgic memories. That's why I encourage people when they find themselves in a situation such as you're reminiscing about your past and other people start drifting away because they're bored, you might start asking them about theirs and start a conversation, a dialogue. In that sense, you can broaden it out a little more.

Luna: Can this nostalgia be a destructive force that can really incubate anger, isolation or hatred? It seems like it could have that potential

Batcho: Most of the research suggests that nostalgia is aligned with or correlated with very soft, pro-social emotions such as compassion, empathy, altruism. It's unlikely, generally, to be associated with hostility or anger. Can it be isolating? That's a very interesting question because you could argue that if you find yourself, the victim of or a survivor of very unique circumstances and now you're nostalgic for a time before that, other people might not be able to relate to you. You might or might not have the motivation to leave your past behind.

That led me to doing the qualitative analysis of memoirs of people, who had survived under wartime conditions. What's particularly interesting to me is that, when those individuals recount how they had to adapt to significant change. In some cases became relocated, not by their own choice but because of conditions of war. They became, for example, refugees or they had to emigrate. Initially, in the early stages, they almost had a psychic block against accepting a new culture, a new life. They almost wallowed in their nostalgic memories of the past and found as time went on that that became very isolating. Because the people they were among, were not able to share that.

What leads ultimately to a healthy kind of nostalgia is the one where the positive pro-social aspects of nostalgia can reconnect us now. Not just to people in our past but to the people we're dealing with today. That is possible, that can happen. All the memoirs that I've studied, have demonstrated how that happens. It happens by confronting the past with the current situation in trying to find what were the lessons we learned from our past that we can now tweak, update, customize and use to cope with the turmoil and the conflict in the change that we've gone through to sort of be more optimistic towards the future.

The other aspect of this is that some people are looking at what they might refer to as social nostalgia and looking at groups and having designs where they're comparing intra-group versus inter-group. In those situations, you're perhaps talking about a slightly different phenomenon.

Luna: Can nostalgia hold us back by keeping us dwelling on the past? Can it really impede what is happening in the current moment and in the future?

Batcho: When I began collecting data, that was the prevailing belief among theorists. Before people started collecting empirical evidence, it was just assumed. In fact, much of the psychoanalytic thought that predated behaviorism and modern or contemporary social science argued that it would be regressive try to revisit your past. That the danger was that if your past is better than your present, why would you not just then stay there? Well, once I began collecting data and then other people, of course, have extended this even worldwide, what we find is that generally speaking, that is not what happens.

I've thought a great deal about this and most of the research I've covered it looks like this. Nostalgia is bittersweet. Why did it evolve that way? If you take a social evolutionary perspective, it would make perfect sense that we would want to revisit our past so that we always learn from it. At the same time, we don't want to stay in the past. The sweetness entices us to revisit our past. Once we're there, the bitterness of knowing that actually it no longer exists reminds us that we must return to the present. That makes us want to return to the present.

My argument is that it's almost never, at least the research suggests it would be extremely unlikely for someone to want to remain in the past. If someone found themselves being trapped in the past, that suggests that they're experiencing some sort of difficulty. It could be that they're undergoing a very intolerable current situation in their life and they might seek counseling to help them deal with that because they're using nostalgia then or their memories as an escape. For the most part, most people my research shows, because nostalgia is a social emotion it is actually correlated with or associated with healthy coping mechanisms such as seeking out others when they're having difficulties. We, in fact, when we revisit our memories, we try to remember how other people in our lives solved problems in the past and then use that as a role model for how we want to solve the problems we're experiencing today so it's generally healthy.

Luna: How does age affect a person's feelings of nostalgia? Is it across the board or is it older or younger people?

Batcho: My original data set suggested that there is a bump in nostalgia where it peaks not in old age as many theorists would have expected but peaks in young adulthood. Most theorists argue that the reason for that increase in nostalgia during young adulthood is because it's such a pivotal developmental transitional period. It is literally the time when a person has one foot still back in their childhood and one foot anticipating their move into complete adult independence.

While they have a little bit of their identity still aligned with or connected to their past, they are eager to forge ahead and for that reason, there is a lot more frequency of nostalgic reminiscence going on because there's a bit over reluctance out of trepidation. Will my future be as wonderful and as rosy as my past was? We know that transitional periods including developmental ones trigger nostalgia.

Some newer research is suggesting that there might be a smaller but another bump in older individuals and that is because they're watching a significant change in their own lifestyle from when they were for example in terms of physical well-being or physical health completely in the prime of their health versus looking ahead toward aging as well I might not be able to be as active as I once had been or maybe they're suffering with physical conditions or disorders that limit some of their lifestyles. For that reason, they would also become more nostalgic.

Luna: Do you think nostalgia has always been a part of the human experience?

Batcho: When I first did literature review in order to put together my nostalgia inventory, I was really impressed to find references to nostalgia before it ever had the name nostalgia and those references go back thousands of years. You can find in literature all kinds of examples of people who were in some sense nostalgic for sometimes their home or their homeland and that fits the original definition of it as homesickness but also in terms of longing for the past and therefore the argument is that it's universal. It probably is part of the human experience, so it's always been there as a potential. It cuts across all cultures and all historical time periods.

Luna: That's really fascinating. Also can you just-- Now you've touched on it a few times, can you explain your nostalgia inventory and how you use it in your research?

Batcho: Yes, because I define nostalgia as a longing for or missing for one's personal past, I comprised it of items that asked people to what extent they missed something from their past. Some of the items on the inventory are really conceptual or abstract such as missing the innocence of childhood or missing the freedom from having responsibilities. Others are more concrete missing your toys, missing pets that you had in your former days and it turns out that there really are probably two factors within it.

One which is a more concrete set of things that we miss from our past and the other being a little more abstract a little more conceptual and I argue that nostalgia is an umbrella that covers both of those. My inventory measures it in a way that connects people to missing their own past and that is not correlated with inventories that look at it more as a historical type of experience or social event.

Luna: I might also go back to where we're talking a little bit more about the memories, how they can be both positive and negative.

Batcho: Yes.

Luna: In a previous episode, we did Episode 91 how memory can be manipulated. We featured memory expert, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus. She explained that memories can be manipulated under the right conditions. What are your thoughts on that and how that can affect our levels of nostalgia about the past?

Batcho: I agree. I agree completely. I think that to some extent, how we interpret our past, how we comprehend, can change. We can have retrospective comprehension or interpretation of our memories. That depends upon what purpose we're trying to serve in our present. If someone is trying to find a reason to feel loved or worthy of love, then they might have a guided sense through their own historic memories of looking for the times when they were loved. Maybe even doing an analysis of. I wonder if something went wrong or was I partly responsible or two, I just have bad luck?

A good example of that would be if someone is undergoing a breakup of an important relationship. Now, they might be motivated to have nostalgic memories either of that relationship and saying, gee, how did we come to this unhappiness when we were so passionately in love in the beginning? There are researchers now looking at relationship nostalgia. It can be helpful to some extent but on the other hand, if you're using it as a way of almost arguing that you want out of the relationship. You say, "Well, the reason why I am leaving this relationship is because when I compare my satisfaction with it today, with how much joy I got out of it in the beginning, I see that it's been all downhill."

I'm arguing here that our motivations can actually influence how we remember the past and how we interpret the meaningfulness of our past.

Luna: Just to wrap this up for our listeners. We've touched on a lot of different areas of nostalgia. I want to know, is there a way for society to collectively use nostalgia to better itself? How can we tangibly benefit from it?

Batcho: I think it's really a very important resource and it's underutilized. I say that even though we have all these spin-offs and reboots and we have a lot of nostalgia. If you use a search engine for the term nostalgia, it is incredible. You can find maybe near 300 million hits on that search engine but just because you have a lot of something doesn't mean that you're using it effectively. We could start to incorporate it more effectively, I believe. Not just in media, that's one great vehicle. We can also look at how we can use it in social media, in cyberspace, but also in education and perhaps in parenting.

One of the healthiest forms of nostalgia throughout human history has always been to connect each generation to the next. In that sort of bond, you pass down to the next generation, the best of the past. Just because we are oriented toward progress, doesn't mean that there isn't something of value that we might have forgotten from the past. A good example of that would be to say that all the technology that has been developed recently, is absolutely wonderful. All the progress in medicine has saved so many lives. We are almost obsessed with future-oriented progress. The only risk that brings us is the risk of wondering whether we've made certain trade-offs.

Are there things that were present before that were either not doing as effectively today? For example, are we helping young children develop empathy for others and empathy for those who are different from themselves as effectively as we might? There are many possible practical tools. It used to be that when parents had children, they relive their own nostalgic memories by reading children's books that they had read to them to their own children. Then when they became grandparents doing the same for their grandchildren, because the millennials have delayed marriage and children and family size has shrunk, we might be having a little bit of a deficit in those kinds of intergenerational transmissions.

I think that we can learn a lot from that and wonder how we can now tweak that replicate it today so that we don't just look across generations, but we look across cultures. We look across differences of opinion and diverse ideologies. So, what can we find that is a common bond so that we can get along with one another better than perhaps some people think we're getting along with one another today. Because differences can be divisive, nostalgia could be in a way part of the cure because nostalgia does the opposite. Instead of dividing, it unites.

Luna: There's a lot of great things that nostalgia can do for us if we just hone in on that and try to utilize it as you just mentioned.

Batcho: Yes, absolutely.

Luna: Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Batcho. We really appreciate your time. It has been a really very interesting topic. I think our listeners will really enjoy.

Batcho: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it myself.

Luna: Before we go, I want to remind you that we want to hear from you. You can e-mail your comments and ideas to speakingofpsychology@apa.org. That's speaking of psychology all one-word dot org. Please consider giving us a rating in iTunes, it really helps. Speaking of Psychology is part of the APA podcast network which includes other informative podcasts like APA Journals Dialogue about new psychological research and Progress Notes about the practice of psychology. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also go to our website SpeakingofPsychology.org to listen to more episodes. I'm Kaitlin Luna with the American Psychological Association.