Psychological factors influencing the vividness and affect of visitors’ recall of nostalgic life memories in museums

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of nostalgia on museum visitors’ memories of life episodes from the distant past following their encounters with museum objects they remembered from earlier stages of their lives. The study sought to understand how the vividness of these memories and the affect of such memories in the present day were related to nostalgia and other psychological factors. A total of 87 participants who had visited one of three different social history museums located in Japan were recruited for the study. A total of 253 separate memory episodes were obtained from the participants, who were asked to rate the strength of several psychological factors associated with the memories triggered by the museum exhibits. A conceptual model in which nostalgia mediated psychological factors was tested through structural equation modeling. The results revealed that the nostalgia evoked by life episodes completely mediated the effects of the vividness of one’s memory of those episodes recalled in the present. Furthermore, there was also some evidence of a similar mediation on one’s emotional affect associated with life episodes in the present day.