Why it is good to be nostalgic: Sentimental people ‘have closer friendships’

Do you have lots of close friends and put effort into keeping these relationships going?

If so, you are probably nostalgic, according to researchers.

A study found people who are prone to nostalgia have more close friends and are better at keeping them than those who are less sentimental.

This can then pay off in terms of health and wellbeing, they said.

Nostalgia is when people reflect wistfully upon fond and meaningful experiences from their past.

These often include memories of happy times with close friends or relatives, such as childhood moments or key events such as weddings and birthdays.

A study of 1,500 people from the US and Europe found that nostalgia drives people to maintain social networks.

“People who value nostalgia and experience nostalgia more frequently are more aware of their important relationships and the need to strengthen them,” the researchers wrote in the journal Cognition and Emotion.

“Over time, they may develop more enduring close relationships, even in the face of potential losses in social networks across the lifespan.

“We found that nostalgia is more closely linked to the motivation to strengthen existing social ties than to the motivation to expand social networks.”

For the study, people were asked questions such as: how prone are you to feeling nostalgic?; how often do you experience nostalgia?; and how important is it for you to bring to mind nostalgic experiences?

People were also asked about their motivation to make new friends, such as whether they were eager to make friends, wanted to meet new people and were excited to meet new people.

Other questions included whether people were committed to maintaining friendships, whether they wanted them to last for a very long time, and whether the person would be upset if a friendship was to end in the near future.

Those in the study also estimated the number of different types of social networks they had, including closest networks (such as being unable to imagine life without those people), close networks (not quite as close as those in the inner circle, but still close), and less close networks (feel less close to, but who are still important).

For the first experiment in the study, a group of undergraduate students in the US was surveyed.

They had an average of seven people they were very close to and another 21 people who were still important to them.

A second experiment included adults whose average age was 40, who tended to have a smaller social circle by that age.

They had five people they were very close to, on average, and about 14 other people who were still important to them.

The third experiment used data from a long-running Dutch survey, the Longitudinal Internet Studies for Social Sciences (Liss), to examine the effect of nostalgia on social networks over a seven-year period.

This found that the people tended to become more nostalgic as they got older.

When questioned in 2013, they scored an average of 3.95 for nostalgia, out of a possible seven. By 2019, this had risen to 4.21.

The people who scored “high” or “medium” for nostalgia kept the same number of strong social ties over this period.

In contrast, those with low levels of nostalgia had 18% fewer close relationships.

Taken together, the three experiments showed that reminiscing about happy times helped people realise the importance of close relationships and motivated them to maintain them.

Previous studies have found that nostalgia is associated with feelings of being loved and trusted, while helping alleviate loneliness and depression.

Reflecting on a nostalgic event also promotes feelings of satisfaction with relationships.

The latest study was from researchers from the University at Buffalo, in the US, and Kyoto University, in Japan.

Researcher Kuan-Ju Huang, from Kyoto University, said: “People who feel nostalgic more often and value those memories are more aware of their important relationships and the need to nurture them.

“This means these friendships may be more likely to last, even as we get older and our lives, interests and responsibilities, change.”