From nostalgia, through communion, to psychological benefits: the moderating role of narcissism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for one’s past, is a social, self-relevant, and ambivalent (albeit predominantly positive) emotion. It fosters tenderness, social connectedness, life meaning, self-continuity, self-esteem, optimism, and inspiration. In two experiments, we manipulated nostalgia and examined mechanisms underlying its psychological benefits. Two communal mechanisms emerged consistently: love-friendship and unity-togetherness. The findings establish the sociality of nostalgia, identifying the communion mechanisms of love-friendship and unity-togetherness as mediators of nostalgia’s benefits. The findings also identified narcissism as a moderator of nostalgia’s benefits: although both high and low narcissists gained benefits via increased communion, high narcissists also experienced a reduction in some benefits due to decreased agency.