Nostalgic Experiences Research Articles

“My Grandfather kept one of these tins on top of the bookshelf”

Purpose – This explorative paper aims to identify the dimensions of recalled consumption experiences involving packaging by means of interpretive analysis. Scholarly interest towards experiential aspects of consumption started in the beginning of 1980s. Design/methodology/approach – The memory-based research materials were collected from 97 Finnish consumers within a two-day weblog session. The consumers were asked to describe personally meaningful packaging-related experiences and to submit a photograph of the relevant packages. The analysis focused on common dimensions associated with the described meaningful experiences. Findings – The authors built a conceptual framework incorporating “nostalgic” and “accessible” experiences. The dimensions of nostalgic experience, which although anchored in the present can be re-lived only in the memory, include the involvement of key persons; the places and physical spaces in which the experience happened; and actions or practices involving packaging during an experience. Accessible experiences include the following dimensions: lasting product and packaging encounters; individual personal experiences; culturally meaningful celebrations and rituals; and packaging that appeals to the senses. It is proposed that meaningful consumption experiences involving packaging may reflect both nostalgic and accessible dimensions. Originality/value – Although there is a growing interest towards consumers’ role in the packaging value chain, their packaging experiences are addressed rarely. It is proposed that the consumption experiences involving packaging are a mix of nostalgic and accessible dimensions.

Somatography and Film: Nostalgia as Haunting Memory Shown in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia

The subject of my paper is to examine nostalgia as “involuntary memory” in Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie Nostalghia. Tarkovsky understands filming as “sculpting in time.” In his book with the same title he writes that “time and memory merge into each other.” In order to understand this we have to distinguish between a voluntary memory, which refers to the intentional effort to remember, and the involuntary memory, which is like a force that comes over us, that affects us. The latter is especially the case with nostalgia. In nostalgia we can find a revision of the past but the revised version of the past is not primarily about the production of a new representation of memory but more a case of re-experiencing the same past through returning to it, particularly in an embodied manner. Nostalgia is a particular mode of “memory of place.” Places we inhabit or pass through leave an impact on us, for we are bodily subjects and as such we have a relationship with the places that surround us. What Tarkovsky’s movie Nostalghia shows is how the spatio-temporality of the present is “haunted” by the superimposed appearance of the past. Nostalgia is a movement of seeping returns. The past transpires in the present, and Tarkovsky makes this structure visible in using the visual medium of film. He shows how the texture of the everyday world fuses with the imagined memory of the past. In my paper, I construe this nostalgic experience provided by Tarkovsky.

Insights on How Museum Objects Mediate Recall of Nostalgic Life Episodes at a Shōwa Era Museum in Japan

Understanding visitors' nostalgic experiences in museums as they make connections between museum objects and their life histories is of considerable interest to the museum field. This study employed a qualitative multiple-case narrative approach to understand the common characteristic themes about the nature of visitors' nostalgic recall, mediated though exhibits at a Shōwa era social history museum in Aichi Prefecture, Japan. Five sustaining characteristic themes about visitors' nostalgic recall are exemplified through five visitor cases in this study, including, a) Objects tied to collective identity and values perceived to be lost; b) Objects used or consumed as part of visitors' life-scripts; c) Objects associated with individuals dear to the visitor; d) Objects associated with childhood; and e) Objects that invoke vicarious nostalgia. The outcomes of this study contribute to the broader understandings of the power of museum objects to incite strong nostalgic recollections and more broadly to our understanding of visitors' long-term memories through their encounters with museum objects.

日本人はノスタルジアを経験しうるか？

Japanese people’s experience of nostalgia was investigated and difference between nostalgia in Japan, and in English-speaking countries were compared. Undergraduate student participants (N＝61) were divided into three conditions: “nostalgic recollection”, “ordinary recollection”, and “positive recollection”. Content analysis indicated that consistent with previous studies, Japanese students describe more about themselves, or about a relationship with a specific person during nostalgic narratives than in other narratives. However, the proportion of description including acceptance of the past was lower than in previous studies. Results also indicated that less positive and more negative affect were observed in the nostalgic recollection condition than in the other two conditions. In addition, there was more “bittersweet” affect in the nostalgic recollection condition. Furthermore, no appreciable differences were observed in the three conditions in relation to the three major functions of nostalgia―self-esteem, meaning in life, and perceived social support. We have discussed the necessity for exploring the uniqueness of nostalgia in Japan compared to that in English-speaking countries.

This is your song: Using participants’ music selections to evoke nostalgia and autobiographical memories efficiently.

Almost everyone has experienced the unexpected tang of nostalgia (Wildschut, Sedikides, Arndt, & Routledge, 2006). Nostalgic experiences are characterized by autobiographical memories that feel self-relevant and are filled with warm, positively toned feelings about friends, romantic partners, family, or childhood (Hepper, Ritchie, Sedikides, & Wildschut, 2012; Hepper et al., 2014; Holak & Havlena, 1992; Wildschut et al., 2006) that contribute to making one's life feel meaningful (Routledge et al., 2011). Although positive feelings are at the forefront, negative feelings may also be present (Barrett et al., 2010; Wildschut et al., 2006), often as a longing for someone or something in the past or grieving for something gone (Hepper et al., 2012, 2014).Music as a Trigger for Nostalgia and Autobiographical MemoriesMusic is undoubtedly capable of influencing how one feels. Using an experience sampling method, Juslin, Liljestrom, Vastfjall, Barradas, and Silva (2008) found that in 64% of episodes where music was present, the music playing affected how the listener felt. It is important to note that nostalgia can be aroused by music (Barrett et al., 2010; Janata, Tomic, & Rakowski, 2007; Wildschut et al., 2006). For example, Zentner, Grandjean, and Scherer (2008) used factor analysis to identify nine emotional states prompted by music and found that nostalgia formed one of those factors. Therefore, it is no surprise that some researchers have turned to music to evoke nostalgia and the autobiographical memories that frequently accompany nostalgic experiences.When music is used to evoke nostalgia or autobiographical memories, researchers have typically played popular music from a participant's preadolescence to young adulthood without regard to each person's music preferences (see, e.g., Barrett et al., 2010; Janata et al., 2007). This approach is based on the idea that autobiographical memories formed in preadolescence through early adulthood tend to be particularly salient (Rubin, Rahhal, & Poon, 1998), and music from that time is linked to emotions that can last into one's later years (Schulkind, Hennis, & Rubin, 1999).1 However, evoking nostalgia with this approach has had limited success. Although participants are often familiar with songs from their past (Schulkind et al., 1999), the songs do not reliably prompt nostalgia or autobiographical memories. For example, Barrett et al. (2010) played songs that were on the Billboard Top-100 pop, hip-hop, and R&B lists when each participant was between 7 and 19 years old. Although participants often found these songs to be familiar, only 26% of them were rated as being at least somewhat nostalgic. Notably, even this somewhat low rate was obtained using a rather lenient definition of nostalgia (a rating of 3-5 on a 5-point Likert scale). Similarly, researchers have used this approach to prompt autobiographical memories. Using a technique almost identical to the one already described, Janata et al. (2007) found that only 29% of songs elicited autobiographical memories from participants, although participants frequently found the songs to be familiar. As Barrett et al. concluded, musicevoked nostalgia is largely idiosyncratic, and there are no particular songs that consistently elicit nostalgia across individuals.Selecting songs more closely suited to each individual should create higher rates of nostalgia. For example, Routledge et al. (2011) found that when participants thought of songs that made them feel nostalgic, they reported experiencing more nostalgia than when they listened to recent popular songs (Study 1). In addition, they found that when participants read lyrics to songs they found nostalgic, they experienced more nostalgia than when they read control lyrics (Study 2). Although these methods take participants' preferences into account, thinking of nostalgic songs and reading lyrics of nostalgic songs are less immersive than actually listening to songs. …

Brand Positioning for Sub-Saharan Africa’s Rural Tourism Development

Well-conceived and effectively managed rural tourism brand in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) can help build favourable reputation which enhances the confidence of tourists. The purpose of this paper is to formulate brand essence (functional and emotional benefits derivable from a brand) and brand position statement, for SSA’s rural tourism development. This study conducted descriptive analysis of brand essence for SSA’s rural tourism development. It is exploratory, rather than conclusive in nature. Functional benefits of SSA’s rural tourism include her diverse natural and cultural attributes, friendliness of population, climatic conditions, and unique rural landscape. Her emotional benefits include the ‘feel-good’ factor when tourists are offered the ‘rural idyll’ experience not found in any other continent or sub-continent, or buy local foods and souvenirs. This positive feeling of visiting SSA’s rural areas adds richness and depth to the tourists’ experience of being involved with her brand. The knowledge of rural tourism brand essence can help SSA’s local communities, local governments and national governments to communicate not just the functional values, but also the emotional values of visiting rural areas to tourists. This will lead to particular relationships between local communities and stakeholders to enact these emotional values or rewards. SSA’s rural tourism brand positioning statement could read: “To tourists seeking nostalgic experiences, novelty and escape, rural SSA offers authentic rural landscape, ‘rural idyll’ experience, and amazing friendly populations”.

Shelf Lives: On Nostalgic Libraries

This short essay considers the increasingly nostalgic life of physical books. From immaculate leather-bound collections to “dummy” libraries, in private homes or department stores, since at least the mid-nineteenth century, old books have enjoyed past-directed affective relationships with users and consumers, communicating continuity with, appreciation of, and longing for aspects of time past. These relationships, falling along a spectrum from library-as-utility to library-as-simulation, can be mapped onto different kinds of nostalgic experience.

I Remember it Well: Epiphanies, Nostalgia, and Urban Exploration As Mediators of Tourist Memory

This article takes the author's own nostalgic feelings for a now defunct theme park and translates these into an analysis of other people's tourism-related nostalgic experiences. In doing so, the article furthers discussion around nostalgia and memory within tourism and approaches new ground in the use of images, online forums, and urban exploration as mediators of individual and shared nostalgias. It has also been argued that while nostalgia is a key motivational factor in tourist decision making, it has not been fully explored. Furthermore, this article uniquely focuses on younger people where previous research has considered older age groups. As a consequence, the semiautoethnographic discussion, supported with quantitative and phenomenological content analysis of online forums, explores the creation of tourist epiphanies and identifies key themes around family, repeat visitation, and the preplanned creation of new nostalgias within hyperreal environments.

Development and validation of an emic scale to measure ad-evoked nostalgia in France

The practice of imbuing marketing communications with nostalgic reverie is prevalent in numerous countries. However, scholarly research investigating consumer response to such communication across cultures is lacking. This inquiry follows an emic approach examining and measuring ad-evoked personal nostalgia in France. Findings from five studies (N = 699) reveal significant differences in consumer reactions in France, as compared to earlier research based on American samples. Among the French, nostalgic advertising evokes personal memories and cultural nostalgia, contrasted to reports of past imagery, physiological and positive and negative emotional reactions in the United States. Furthermore, while cultural nostalgia is an important component of the French personal nostalgic experience, it is the personal memories that are the key to the creation of positive impressions about the ad and brand (brand heritage, brand bonds, and attitudes), and driving behavioral intentions. The emic French scale was found to be superior to an etic ad-nostalgia measure, in terms of fit and variance explained of the endogenous variables. The findings contribute to cross-cultural advertising and marketing research, and can be instructive for advertisers targeting the French market.

Here and Now, There and Then: Nostalgia as a Time and Space Phenomenon

This paper provides an overview of nostalgia focusing on the ways in which the nexus of time and space has been theorized. The meta-analysis presented here highlights the complex, recursive, and nuanced features of the nostalgic experience, suggesting that nostalgia is not only directed toward the past, but also the future.

Nostalgia-Evoked Inspiration: Mediating Mechanisms and Motivational Implications.

Six studies examined the nostalgia-inspiration link and its motivational implications. In Study 1, nostalgia proneness was positively associated with inspiration frequency and intensity. In Studies 2 and 3, the recollection of nostalgic (vs. ordinary) experiences increased both general inspiration and specific inspiration to engage in exploratory activities. In Study 4, serial mediational analyses supported a model in which nostalgia increases social connectedness, which subsequently fosters self-esteem, which then boosts inspiration. In Study 5, a rigorous evaluation of this serial mediational model (with a novel nostalgia induction controlling for positive affect) reinforced the idea that nostalgia-elicited social connectedness increases self-esteem, which then heightens inspiration. Study 6 extended the serial mediational model by demonstrating that nostalgia-evoked inspiration predicts goal pursuit (intentions to pursue an important goal). Nostalgia spawns inspiration via social connectedness and attendant self-esteem. In turn, nostalgia-evoked inspiration bolsters motivation.

Transnationalism, return visits and identity negotiation: South Korean-New Zealanders and the Korean national sports festival

Migration has commonly been theorised as a process that ends with settlement in a new country and thus return visits have not been conceptualised as part of the migration experience. As has been noted in the literature, the return visit is a temporary visit to an individual’s place of birth (or the ‘external homeland’) from a current country of residence which may help immigrants to construct and negotiate a transnational identity between the new and old homes. This study focuses on how one government, South Korea, uses sport as a part of a wider strategy to encourage return visits in order to maintain cultural, economic and political connections with overseas citizens. More specifically, this paper examines the experiences of Korean immigrants living in New Zealand who return to Korea to participate in the annual National Sports Festival. Drawing upon document analysis, interviews and participant observation data, three different types of experiences emerged: (1) athletic experiences through the event itself; (2) nostalgic experiences from reconnecting with families and friends or enjoying forms of culture and entertainment difficult to access in the receiving country; and (3) political and economic experiences through interactions with politicians and business people which may contribute to mutual benefits between their old and new homes. Overall, the paper discusses the experience and implications of Koreans who represent New Zealand in an (inter)national sport and cultural festival and its influence on their transnational lives and identities.

Memory and reward systems coproduce 'nostalgic' experiences in the brain.

People sometimes experience an emotional state known as 'nostalgia', which involves experiencing predominantly positive emotions while remembering autobiographical events. Nostalgia is thought to play an important role in psychological resilience. Previous neuroimaging studies have shown involvement of memory and reward systems in such experiences. However, it remains unclear how these two systems are collaboratively involved with nostalgia experiences. Here, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of healthy females to investigate the relationship between memory-reward co-activation and nostalgia, using childhood-related visual stimuli. Moreover, we examined the factors constituting nostalgia and their neural correlates. We confirmed the presence of nostalgia-related activity in both memory and reward systems, including the hippocampus (HPC), substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area (SN/VTA), and ventral striatum (VS). We also found significant HPC-VS co-activation, with its strength correlating with individual 'nostalgia tendencies'. Factor analyses showed that two dimensions underlie nostalgia: emotional and personal significance and chronological remoteness, with the former correlating with caudal SN/VTA and left anterior HPC activity, and the latter correlating with rostral SN/VTA activity. These findings demonstrate the cooperative activity of memory and reward systems, where each system has a specific role in the construction of the factors that underlie the experience of nostalgia.

Tourist Itineraries

This essay offers a rumination on the many routes that offer to solve the unfinished business of modernity, unfinished business marked by the experience of nostalgia, the complex emotional mélange of longing, desire, and history. I use autoethnography to untangle the webs of signification around my relationship to Europe in general, and Spain in particular, as a site of personal “heritage,” linking its role in my performance of self with the production of otherness that is necessary to construct a self. I incorporate my memories of the Audrey Hepburn film Sabrina, which, along with many other classic Hollywood films and literature, provided an imaginative resource for a romanticized vision of Europe. This is complicated by a diasporic Cuban identity that circulates ideas of longing and home along the routes of Hispanidad—the cultural and migratory navigation between the spaces of Latin America, the United States, and the Iberian Peninsula.

A Study on the Factors of Interactive Scenario Design on Ecotourism for Active Ageing

Experience ecotourism particularly could encourage active ageing groups with sensory experience, and easily help them reciprocally interact. This study invited four active aging persons and two professional tour-guiding staff to conduct walk aloud and walk through interviews in an ecological tourism destination Taiwan Nantou Sun Link Sea Forest Recreation Area suitable for the elderly's tourism according to the results of the first phase so as to further extract the problems and demands that the elderly face in ecotourism. The results show that: The factors forming the active aging groups' eco-tourism travel experience, including the external environment, physiological and psychological factors. However, to enhance the positive experience of the active aging groups' ecotourism when both physiological and environmental factors meet the conditions, external situation involvement is an important medium to enhance the elderly's satisfaction, including both emotion and story. The emotion part contains the experience of five senses, accompanying emotion and nostalgia experience; while the story part includes daily life stories, new knowledge obtaining and sharing mechanism. This study suggests that the results obtained from the above can be applied to shape the scenario design of future ecotourism field to help develop services and related technology products in order to enhance the elderly's joy and experience in ecotourism.

Exploring tourists' nostalgic experiences during culture festivals: the case of the Sung Chiang Battle Array

This study uses the means-end chain (MEC) approach with fuzzy conceptualization and incorporates Kano's model to elicit perceptions of nostalgic experiences and to explore preferences for Sung Chiang Battle Array (SCBA) cultural festivals. We provide a hierarchical value map that fuses attribute–consequence–value chains and Kano's model to distinguish the relationships between the factors of nostalgic experience and tourist satisfaction. Fuzzy linguistics is adopted to address the ill-defined nature of tourists' linguistic judgements so that they can be interpreted for the proposed MEC. By applying the ‘laddering' technique to interviews with 178 tourists, the resulting linkages strengthen the ability to probe outcomes and values and to derive a cognitive representation of nostalgic meanings. The findings of this research imply that, overall, tourists experience three different dominant perceptual orientations for nostalgic experiences in SCBA cultural festivals: ‘Learning and the challenge of a new experience', ‘Culture and art appreciation', and ‘The link between history and emotion'. The study's findings have implications for researchers and practitioners interested in nostalgic tourism.

Reading Nostalgia

Reading Nostalgia

The sound of yesteryear on display: a rethinking of nostalgia as a strategy for exhibiting pop/rock heritage

The increasing presentation of popular music culture as heritage is manifested in the recent proliferation of museums of pop/rock culture. This calls for an examination of the current practices of disseminating pop/rock heritage through exhibitions. Two trends have been identified and criticised by previous commentators: first, the prominence of nostalgia in exhibition narratives and second, that exhibitions of popular music tend to display ancillary objects rather than music itself. This article offers a rethinking of nostalgia as a strategy for disseminating pop/rock heritage and explores the potential of music as a trigger for nostalgic experiences in exhibitions. While agreeing with much of the critique levelled at the nostalgic approach to pop/rock culture, we suggest that with a more nuanced conception of reflective nostalgia, the affective appeal of the nostalgic approach can be harnessed without giving in to glamourised oversimplifications of the past. Further, we suggest that mediated memories can form the basis of nostalgic feelings and thus enable the nostalgic approach to span the generational gap and engage visitors who do not have a lived experience of pop/rock heritage. We will illustrate this by contrasting our approach to that taken at ABBA The Museum.

Thematic Events as an Experiential Marketing Tool: Kite Festival on the Experience Stage

The rise of experiential marketing during last decade shed some light on marketing literature. Nowadays, consumers are in search of experiences that “dazzle their senses”, “touch their hearts” and “stimulate their minds” and also marketers need to understand customer experience (Schmitt, 1999). Therefore, studies and researches on experiential features of products or services have appeared in the marketing literature. However, academic investigations on the measurement of event experiences are very recent. Thus, the main aim of this study was to identify the underlying aspects of event experience and to examine events as an experiential marketing tool via a sample of 300 respondents who were participated in Kite Festival, an annual event held in Eskisehir. Results revealed three aspects, which are “emotional experience”, “escapist and relaxing experience” and “social and nostalgic experience”. The study has significant implications as to how well marketing practitioners and recreationist implement experiential marketing and experiential dimensions of the events.

Nostalgia as a Resource for Psychological Health and Well‐Being

AbstractHistorically, nostalgia has been viewed as a disease of the brain or the mind. However, in recent years, nostalgia has received a conceptual rehabilitation due to a revival of scholarly interest accompanied by the use of contemporary empirical methods. Drawing upon this recent work, we propose that nostalgia is an important resource for psychological health and well‐being. We begin by detailing the characteristics of the nostalgic experience and then discuss a wide range of studies demonstrating that psychological threat triggers nostalgia, nostalgia enhances psychological health and well‐being, and nostalgia promotes adaptive psychological functioning among individuals at risk for poor mental health. We also highlight the need for future research on nostalgia's relation to psychological health.