Where does nostalgia collide?

A sentimental preference for the products, styles, and experiences that were current earlier in a person's life, treated as a measurable individual difference that shapes what shoppers like. Holbrook's 1993 study Nostalgia and Consumption Preferences introduced a nostalgia proneness scale and showed that people who score high tend to favor the films, music, and goods of their youth, and Holbrook and Schindler's 2003 Nostalgic bonding traced how such preferences attach people to particular objects. Here nostalgia is a consumer trait that predicts buying and liking, not the warm emotion studied by psychologists nor the disease once diagnosed in soldiers.[1][2]

Unit

A person's score on a nostalgia proneness scale, or a rated preference for a past-era product

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed with self-report proneness scales and with ratings of liking for goods and media tied to different birth eras

A self-relevant and largely positive emotion in which a person fondly revisits cherished personal memories, usually centered on close others and past selves, and comes away feeling more connected and that life has meaning. Wildschut and colleagues' 2006 Nostalgia: Content, triggers, functions mapped its typical content and showed it is triggered by loneliness and restores a feeling of belonging, and Sedikides and colleagues' 2008 review Nostalgia framed it as a resource that supports meaning and social connection. Here nostalgia is a felt emotional state with psychological functions, not a shopper's taste for old products nor a clinical illness of the homesick.[3][4]

Unit

An episode of nostalgic feeling, rated for intensity, or a state or trait nostalgia score

Recovery means

The feeling lifts mood and connectedness, and typically eases back to baseline after the recalled episode ends

Measured by

Induced in experiments and gauged by self-report state and trait nostalgia scales and by coding the content of recalled memories

A supposed medical and neurological illness of painful homesickness, coined as a formal diagnosis and thought to afflict soldiers and others far from home, with symptoms said to run from melancholy and insomnia to fever and, in reported cases, death. The Swiss physician Johannes Hofer minted the word in his 1688 dissertation, joining the Greek words for homecoming and pain, and Anspach's 1934 translation made his account widely available in English. Here nostalgia names a diagnosed disease of the body and mind, since abandoned as a medical category, and not the consumer preference or the ordinary emotion the word now labels.[5][6]

Unit

A diagnosed case of the disease in an afflicted person

Recovery means

Contemporary accounts held that return home, or the prospect of it, could relieve or cure the condition

Measured by

Recorded by physicians as a clinical diagnosis from reported homesickness and its bodily symptoms, without any standardized instrument