Nostalgic Reflection Research Articles

A nostalgic reflection on the importance of teamwork for a novice social worker

ABSTRACT This paper reflects the professional and personal experience of a novice social worker and explores the intrinsic value of team support and camaraderie in the progression of early practice. Given the considerable current issues with retention and job satisfaction in the social work profession, it is critical to understand and reflect on what are some of the factors that might enable practitioners to sustain their early careers. This paper explores both the obstacles and opportunities in enhancing teamwork in social work practice, including personal insights and experience underpinned by current literature, and research in this area. Although this is a retrospective analysis of previous experience, the themes emerging resonate with current practice. Themes that will be explored include, relationships, resilience, joint working, team meetings, team dynamics, professional identity, confidence, humour, rituals, debriefing and peer supervision. The author reflects on their initial years of social work practice experience, within a statutory child protection team in Northern Ireland.

Nostalgia Promotes Positive Beliefs about College Belonging and Success among First-Generation College Students

First-generation college students often develop negative thoughts and expectations about whether they belong in college and whether they can be successful in college, and these negative thoughts play a major role in college retention and success. Nostalgia, a mixed but mostly positive emotional experience that involves reflecting on personally meaningful events from one’s life, has been found to promote an optimistic future orientation. We tested the applied value of nostalgia’s future-orienting capacity for fostering positive beliefs about college belonging and success among first-generation college students in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, first-generation students who reflected on a nostalgic event from their past reported more positive beliefs about their potential to discover a sense of belonging in their college community, compared to first-generation students who reflected on an ordinary event. In Experiment 2, nostalgic reflection once again increased positive expectations for belonging in first-generation college students as well as optimism for academic success. We conclude that the power of nostalgia to promote a positive future orientation may be harnessed by institutions and programs looking to encourage belonging and optimism to help first-generation college students adjust to and succeed in college.

Passion and Passio: The Chahua nü and Late Qing Courtesan Narratives

Lin Shu and Wang Shouchang's Bali chahua nü yishi (1899), a translation of La dame aux camélias (1848) by Alexandre Dumas fils, has usually been read with an eye to the idealized figure of the noble courtesan in the Chinese literary tradition. The resemblance of the lady of the camellias to that figure has served to explain both her popular appeal to late Qing readers and her transformation into a Chinese literary and cultural icon. Her iconic status, however, has overshadowed the complex ways in which Lin and Wang's translation retells Dumas fils's story in relation to the array of late Qing courtesan narratives that would have been known to contemporary readers. By closely reading the original story in light of these narratives, this article shows how Dumas fils's tale shares many elements with late Qing courtesan fiction, including negative images of courtesanship, which the translation omits or rewrites. I examine how the translation transforms the morally ambiguous heroine into a devoted lover and re-situates her suffering (passio) and recognition — central motifs in the original story's Christian mythos — within a nostalgic reflection on courtesan-literati culture, where the courtesan serves as the alter ego of the unrecognized literatus.

The effect of a multi-week nostalgia intervention on well-being: Mechanisms and moderation.

Nostalgia is a sentimental longing for one's past. We examined the effect of a 6-week, weekly nostalgia intervention on well-being (positive and negative affect, life satisfaction, subjective vitality, and eudaimonic well-being) over time. After 3 weeks, participants who engaged in nostalgic reflection had higher well-being than those who engaged in ordinary reflection. After 6 weeks, and at a 1-month follow-up, the positive effect of nostalgic reflection was reserved for those who were high on dispositional nostalgia (i.e., well-suited to the nostalgia intervention). However, at these time points, nostalgic reflection was associated with lower well-being among those particularly low on dispositional nostalgia. Across time points, nostalgic reflection was beneficial to the degree that it fostered social connectedness, meaning in life, and self-continuity, pointing to mechanisms that drive nostalgia's positive influence on well-being. In summary, weekly nostalgic reflection has temporary well-being benefits for most (out to 3 weeks) and, beyond that, is a matter of fit-beneficial or adverse to those especially high or low on dispositional nostalgia, respectively. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Nostalgia relieves the disillusioned mind

Disillusionment arises when life experiences strongly discredited positive assumptions or deeply help beliefs. Under these conditions, people feel lost, confused, and disconnected from their social environments. Ultimately, disillusioned individuals struggle to maintain meaning and inhabit a state of existential concern. However, the past can provide solace as a refuge of meaning and social connection. Indeed, nostalgic reflection is a commonly cited source of meaning in life. Accordingly, we investigated if disillusioned people could rely on nostalgic reverie to bolster, or reestablish, diminished perceptions of meaning, in three experiments. In Study 1, we confirmed that experimentally induced disillusionment lowers perceptions of meaning. In Study 2, induced disillusionment caused people to retrieve nostalgic events in a memory recall task, and feelings of nostalgia subsequently suppressed the effect of disillusionment on meaning in life. Finally, in Study 3, we manipulated both disillusionment and nostalgia, before measuring meaningfulness. Only disillusioned participants who did not engage in nostalgic reflection suffered meaning-loss. These results provide convergent evidence for the nostalgia-as-meaning resource hypothesis and further support the well-established psychological benefits of nostalgia. Our findings delineate a common story of our time; disillusioned citizens can replenish and reaffirm meaning in thoughts of past fondness and glory.

Attenuating Pain With the Past: Nostalgia Reduces Physical Pain.

Previous work has found that nostalgia, a sentimental longing for the past, is associated with psychological, emotional, and social benefits. Recent research has demonstrated that nostalgic reflection also can improve individuals’ physical health (i.e., exercise) and reduce temperature-related pain. Building on this, two experiments examined how nostalgia can reduce people’s pain perceptions (i.e., reduced severity and increased tolerance). Specifically, Study 1 showed that inducing nostalgia through a writing task decreased perceived pain severity (i.e., intensity) among self-reported chronic pain sufferers. Study 2, in turn, demonstrated that Japanese individuals experienced increased pain tolerance (i.e., the maximum level of pain a person can tolerate) for a pressure algometer task following thoughts of nostalgia (vs. a control prime). This work provides evidence that nostalgic reflection may serve as a psychological resource to reduce the perceived severity of physical pain.

Horace Barlow. Scientist of vision

Horace Basil Barlow, Fellow of the Royal Society, winner of the Australia Prize, the Royal Medal of the Royal Society and the Schwartz Prize of the Society for Neuroscience, died on 5 July 2020 at the age of 98, 10 days after suffering a stroke. As news spread among his former students and collaborators, one phrase recurred again and again in the messages of nostalgic reflection: ‘the end of an era’.

Leavis and Trilling: a common pursuit

ABSTRACT F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling were two of the more impassioned spokesmen for critical intelligence in twentieth century letters. Part of the continued fascination with both these figures is the clear roles they played as critics writing for distinct publics. The discursive personae they created in assuming this function offers a revealing look into the nature of mid-century criticism during the height of its influence. The aim in what follows is to prompt renewed (not nostalgic) reflection on a time in critical history that foregrounds the style of two of our more powerful defenders of the critical function in the middle years of the twentieth century. To appreciate their style more fully we need to look at them working in their own terms, that is to say writing essays and reviews for the various literary magazines and periodicals they engaged throughout their careers.

Nostalgia and National Identity: Idea of Revisiting the Past in Latvian Fiction

One of the most popular themes in Latvian literature which has regularly arisen at different stages of its development since the 19th century is the idea of returning to the roots, the depiction of a mythological world scene when people lived according to the rhythms of nature, in full harmony with themselves and the world. Ancient times are depicted as a time when Latvians felt free living at their farms and followed the rules of the mythical time. This peculiar feature which we analyse on the basis of literary works, describes vividly the nation’s collective consciousness, desires, and needs. The need for emphasizing the idealised ancient times in the nation’s consciousness is related to the most significant transitional stages in the development of the country, which are characterised by the increased attention to the issues of national identity. During difficult stages in history, nosta lgia is a security mechanism which looks for stability in the past which we do not have in the present. The aim of the paper is to see how the nostalgic reflection on the idealized ancient times in the Latvian literature is related to the pivotal stages in the country’s history when special attention was paid to the national awareness and identity issues.

The implications of nostalgia in German modern sociology

In this article, I deal with nostalgia as an implicit category in the 19th-century German sociological discourses. I draw on the approaches that argue that sociology can be seen as a nostalgic social science since the sociologists? discourses were focused on the issues of causes, characteristics, and consequences of the modern age for individuals and society. Trying to explicate modern society, usually by comparing it to the premodern forms of social order, modern sociologists shaped dichotomous categories that were used for the definition of basic sociological concepts, one of the typical ones being the dichotomy between modern society and traditional communities. I here argue that modern sociologists constructed their theories in relation to the idea of a lack or loss, i.e. in relation to the question of what the modern society left behind during its growth: community, spirit or freedom. An alternative, a solution, or simply a utopian object for making comparison are found exactly in the object that is lost - in the nostalgic reflection on those aspects of humanity that were no longer possible in the modern age. Hence, I argue that modern sociology can be defined as a certain discourse on social loss. This will be elaborated on the examples of theories of Ferdinand Tonnies, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel.

Dickens's Gamers: Social Thinking in Victorian Gaming and Social Systems

In 1905 Lasker's Chess Magazine published a nostalgic reflection on “Charles Dickens as a Chess Player.” Dickens's “old time friend,” Miss Tregear, recalled often playing whist and chess with the competitive novelist: “He was always annoyed when she beat him, and invariably wanted to play another game.” One night, “at midnight,” they reached a draw and Miss Tregear remembers Dickens soliloquizing, “somewhat resignedly,” that the results were just: “Man and woman represent an equation after all. … Intellectual affection is the only lasting love. Love that has a game of chess in it can checkmate any man and solve the problem of life” (12). One “peculiarity” marked Dickens as a chess player: “He always wanted Miss Tregear to play first. He followed all her play and accepted all her variations. ‘It was just so,’ she said, ‘in all his novels. He lets a character lead, and then he simply follows it. … He never created a character’” (12).

Celebrating nostalgia or critiquing naivety: Reading pop music reunions through discourses of the fan life course

This study explores how fans give meaning to pop music reunions through the lens of the life course. It does so through a content analysis of forum comments about TV series The Big Reunion, which reunites chart-topping music acts from the past decades. The fans interpret The Big Reunion in three modes closely related to their life-course position: first, now young adults, the fans read the reunion as a nostalgic phenomenon. Second, they consider the reunion as an ironic event. Third, they question The Big Reunion’s formula by reflecting on it through the prism of their current position in the life course. These readings reveal how the fans celebrate a nostalgic reflection on the pop acts of their youth; yet also offer a critique on their former, ‘naïve’ teenage/child-selves.

An exercise in nostalgia: Nostalgia promotes health optimism and physical activity

Objective: Previous research has shown that nostalgia, a sentimental longing for the past, leads to greater feelings of optimism, with other work demonstrating that optimistic thinking (general & health-orientated) is associated with better physical and psychological health. Integrating these two lines of research, the current studies examined whether nostalgia-induced health optimism promotes attitudes and behaviours associated with better physical well-being.Methods: Participants, in three experiments, were randomly assigned to write about either a nostalgic or ordinary event. Following this, everyone completed a measure of health optimism (Studies 1–3), measures of health attitudes (Study 2) and had their physical activity monitored over the course of 2 weeks (Study 3).Results: The results revealed that, in comparison to control conditions, nostalgic reverie led to greater health optimism (Studies 1–3). Further, heightened health optimism following nostalgic reflection led to more positive health attitudes (Study 2), and increased physical activity over a two-week period (i.e. Fitbit activity trackers; Study 3).Conclusions: These findings highlight the importance of nostalgia on health attitudes and behaviours. Specifically, this work suggests that nostalgia can be used as a mechanism to increase the importance, perceived efficacy and behaviour associated with better physical health.

Looking back to move forward: Nostalgia as a psychological resource for promoting relationship goals and overcoming relationship challenges.

Previous research has shown that nostalgia is a highly social emotion that provides a sense of social connectedness. In the present research, we tested a social motivational function of nostalgia. Specifically, across 7 studies we found converging evidence that nostalgia mobilizes social goals. In Study 1, nostalgia increased the importance people assigned to relationship goals and how optimistic they felt about achieving these goals. In Study 2, nostalgia increased intentions to pursue goals of connecting with friends. In Study 3, experimentally induced pessimism about achieving relationship goals instigated nostalgia. In Study 4, we found evidence that it is the interpersonal nature of nostalgia that is associated with striving to connect with others. Specifically, nostalgia about aspects of the past that were high in sociality was associated with intentions to interact with others, whereas nostalgia for aspects of the past that were low in sociality was not. In Study 5, nostalgic reflection increased friendship-approach goal striving relative to reflecting on ordinary social memories, but did not increase friendship-avoidant goal striving. Finally, in Studies 6 and 7, we found evidence that social-efficacy mediated the effect of nostalgia on striving to connect with others and striving to overcome interpersonal challenges. Together, these findings establish nostalgia as catalyst for social goal pursuit and growth.

Achieving a Shared Understanding of Life. Artists’ reflections on their constructions of the past and the self in traumatic and nostalgic autobiographical picturebooks

When sharing the own life story through a picturebook, artists are expected to be influenced by several factors: their motive for creating an autobiographical picturebook, the construction of their past self and present self through the interplay of text and image, and social, historical and cultural factors and the flow of time between the past and the present. Creators of autobiographical picturebooks may, to a greater or lesser extent, reflect on how these factors have influenced the construction of their life narrative. This article analyzes Peter Sís’s The wall (2007) and Ed Young’s The house Baba built (2011). In both autobiographical picturebooks, the ‘hand of the artist’ cannot be overlooked. The artistic choices show how Sís’s book is based on traumatic memories of his childhood experiences, whereas Young’s book is a nostalgic reflection on his safe and happy childhood. Both artists have been influenced by the social context of their past, but they differ in reflecting on these influences. Sís does not inform the reader about how the book is created or about what led him to making certain choices. Young, on the other hand, reflects explicitly on his process of remembering and creating the book. This article shows how such explicit reflection affects the relation between the life narrator and the reader. Because ‘autobiographical truth’ can be understood as an intersubjective exchange between narrator and reader, ideally leading to a shared understanding of the meaning of a life, the narrator’s explicit reflection on the factors influencing the construction of the life story may ease this ‘shared understanding’. As the books discussed here are examples of ‘crossover picturebooks’, future research may discover whether a shared understanding of life is achieved alike for adult and younger readers. This article was submitted on November 1st, 2013, and published on November 3rd, 2014.

Letting Go of the Cold Facts

“Letting Go of the Cold Facts” argues that Malik Benjelloul’s award-winning Searching for Sugar Man offers a nostalgic reflection on the intersections between politics and music culture in South Africa during Apartheid. The veracity of the film’s account of the career of Six to Rodriguez is less important to its project than its re-animation of a lost moment in the history of popular music, a moment when music consumption appeared to be endowed with cultural and political significance. At the same time, the film’s nostalgic impulses blind it to the complexities of the racialized histories with which it engages.

Vanishing Sensibilities: Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann by Kristina Muxfeldt (review)

Kristina Muxfeldt, Vanishing Sensibilities: Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. xxi + 241 pp.While Kristina Muxfeldt expresses concern about our vanishing sensibilities regarding the meaning of musical pieces and practices of a still active musical canon (xvi), her essay collection certainly helps to regain or ascertain our sensiinto tivities and understandings of the (musical) culture during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Her essays, three on Schubert, two on Beethoven, and one on Robert Schumann, are in part revised versions of previously published articles, such as the piece on Schumann's song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben, which one can find in The Literature of German Romanticism, edited by Dennis F. Mahoney. The various references throughout the book to earlier renderings of her essays allow for the reader to witness a process of maturing and intradialogue helps explain why the collection creates such a gem. Besides the refined prose, meticulous and up-to-date research, and excellent apparatusincluding extensive appendices, and the inclusion of relevant German quotations within the main text or otherwise in full length in the notes (not a given any longer)-the book is captivating above all because of its unpretentious yet sophisticated hermeneutic dialogic structure.Take, for instance, Muxfeldt's essay on Schumann's rendering of Adalbert Chamisso's Frauenlieben und Leben, composed in 1840, ten years after its inception. While Germanisten such as Gerhard Kaiser quickly and all too safely dismiss Chamisso's poetic cycle as a prototypical expression of a male-dominated culture, since it presents only scenes of emotional intensity or crisis in a woman's relation to her husband (86), it is Muxfeldt's approach to ask what made these poems so appealing in the first place, not just for Clara and Robert Schumann but also for their contemporaries. Since Muxfeldt is well-informed about the gender discourse and in fact makes gender sensibilities one of the book's thematic threads, it allows her genuine gesture toward Verstehen of the times and its circumstances without running the danger of naivete. The latter does, however, not imply she focuses on the intentionality of the poet or composer. Instead, instigated by the continued performances of Schumann's song cycle, Muxfeldt's hermeneutic approach pushes aside an ungenerously exclusionary reply to the (88) by exposing the gender dynamics of the time so the poems be understood as a shrewd .. . response to the widely perceived male-centrism of the poetic market (93). As a result, Muxfeldt's discussion of the poems and their musical adaptations reaches nuanced insights, for example, when she comments on Chamisso's texts as follows: Social tendencies appear to us 'progressive' or 'retrogressive' may mingle in the past in combinations unfamiliar and even alienating today (96). In the case of Schumann's cycle she includes the performative aspects of music and reminds us, for example, despite Chamisso's retrogressive poems they provided women singers with songs that did not require them to impersonate a male persona (96).Another positive trait of the book as a whole can be discerned in this particular essay as Muxfeldt impressively masters the historical, literary, and musical discourses and their respective disciplines in order to explore her object of inquiry as a whole. When she analyzes the song cycle in musical terms, she easily blends her descriptive analysis with of the previous literary observations, as the following quote demonstrates: But Schumann chose to end his cycle of songs in the present, omitting the widow's nostalgic reflection on her story from a distant future. Relief from the extreme psychological devastation of 'die Welt ist leer' comes not with the passage of time but by act of will (harmonically as well as emotionally) in the remarkable voice leading brings the tonicized dominant of D minor, where the singer ends, back to the tonic, B b (as is shown in the ex. …

The power of the past: Nostalgia as a meaning-making resource

In three experiments we tested whether nostalgia bolsters meaning in life relative to two other modes of autobiographical thought: imagining a desired future experience and recalling a positive past experience. In Experiment 1 participants thought about a nostalgic or desired future experience and then completed a presence of meaning scale. Thinking about a nostalgic (compared to desired future) experience increased perceived presence of meaning. In Experiment 2 we examined whether nostalgia can additionally reduce the search for meaning. Participants thought about a nostalgic, desired future or recent positive experience, and then completed a search for meaning scale. Nostalgia, relative to both comparison conditions, decreased the search for meaning. Finally we tested whether, by virtue of its capacity to increase meaning, nostalgia can mitigate threats to meaning. In Experiment 3 participants were exposed to either absurd or representational art, under the guise that they would later have to interpret its meaning, and then thought about either a nostalgic or a recent positive experience. Meaning was subsequently measured. The absurd art interpretation condition decreased the perceived presence of meaning but nostalgic reflection attenuated this effect.

Memories of Motherhood and Militancy in Chile: Gender and Nostalgia in Calle Santa Fe by Carmen Castillo

This essay examines how Chilean women of the radical left remember and narrate their stories of resistance in the wake of the Pinochet regime. I will deal specifically with the autobiographical film Calle Santa Fe (2008) by Carmen Castillo and ask how the filmmaker represents the lingering recollections of her own participation in Chile's aborted experiment of democratic-socialist change and the traumatic memories of political persecution. To my mind, the film constitutes a striking example of a critical nostalgic reflection on the period that raises new questions about the multiple meanings of the dictatorial past and how the complex intersections of gender and revolution have shaped such meanings. Calle Santa Fe finds its strength not through two-dimensional idealizations of resistance fighters, but rather through a nuanced rendering of the emotional landscapes of mothers and daughters whose stories bring out the complexities of historical processes while calling into question the gendered assumptions that shape them. By paying attention to the gendered dimensions of political resistance in cultural production, we might complicate appeals to a homogeneous memory of the anti-Pinochet resistance and by extension, contribute to the interdisciplinary dialogue among the humanities and social sciences on the meanings and memories of revolution and dictatorship in post-dictatorial Chile.

Shamans, Nostalgias and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion (review)

Laurel Kendall, Shamans, Nostalgias and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009. 251 pp. Shamans, Nostalgias and the IMF demonstrates Laurel Kendall's rigorous and masterful observation that the aboriginal belief system and its practices can serve as lens through which we can see modernity and social life as they continually unfold in South Korea. It is paragon of work written by mature ethnographer having built long-term engagement in the field, in this case in exploration of issues relating to Korean religion and modernity. This book's contribution to both subjects clearly builds upon Kendall's research and publication record from the last three decades. To name few, these publications include Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits (1985), The Life and Hard Times of Korean Shaman (1988), Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity (1996), and Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class and Consumption in the Republic of Korea (2002). Along with these previous publications on religion specializing in shamanic rituals and modernity with focus on women's worlds and gendered practices, this book continues to articulate the understanding of Korean shamanism as consisting of on-going practices of the present time-not as an icon of feudal past. This understanding comes from her unfailing challenge to the assumption that shamanism represents something fixed and dead, and therefore something not modern. This, in turn, connects to criticism of the dichotomy between tradition and modernity. In this exemplary anthropological work, based on now life-long engagements with the same research participants, it is extremely helpful and intriguing to discover changes in the lives of informants with whom we are already familiar from Kendall's previous work. For example, we again encounter Yongsu's Mother, the key informant shaman from Pine Endurance Village, the ethnographic site featured in Kendall's books in the 1980s. At that time, Yongsu's Mother was novice professional shaman whose narratives and relationship with other women clients reflected the challenge and solidarity set by rural Korean women against patriarchal society rendered particularly so as an impoverished nation still struggling in the aftermath the Korean War. The personal-lifeprogress of this shaman is shown in Kendall's 1990s publication on Korean weddings, which focused on the experience of this shaman as mother of adult children. Yongsu's Mother appears regularly in Shamans, Nostalgias and the IMF, now senior shaman who trains and accompanies other professional shamans in successful shamanic ritual events, and whose life story and shamanic practices have come to represent experiences and practices of semi-urban middle class. The connection between the material affluence of booming Korean economy that has adapted to Western commodification is richly evoked in Kendall's delineation of Yongsu's Mother's narratives that validate the offering (referred to by the participants in these shamanic rituals as the divine appetite ) of Chivas Regal and bananas that takes place as part of current shamanic ceremonies. Readers of Kendall's scholarship will further appreciate her sense of and sensitivity to time-of the duration of its passing and the (critical reflection of) nostalgia that emerges from it-that is crossed in the lives and careers for both research participants and the researcher throughout their longterm relationships. In other words, readers glimpse not only Yongsu's Mother as she advances in life and her career, but also the author's paralleled maturity, revealed in dialectical nostalgic reflection: while resistant to a simple comparison between the materialist present and more innocent time when all of us were younger (131), Kendall candidly reminisces about Korean rural communal life before televisions and automobiles became more prevalent, taking attention away from ritual and personal gatherings. …