On a balmy summer evening a few days before she left for college to
begin her senior year, my daughter looked out the open car window at the
soft purple twilight rushing by and said, “I’m going to save this
moment in my memory so that I can think of it when I get stressed out at
school.”
Most of us have, at one time or another, similarly attempted to take a
mental “snapshot” of a
happy moment so that we may look back on it with
pleasure at some later stage of our lives. As intuitively logical as
this stratagem for future enjoyment may seem, however, the ultimate
success or failure of such attempts is difficult to determine.
Nostalgia being a backward-looking emotional experience, our enjoyment
of any past experience requires us first to actually remember it, and
the capricious nature
of autobiographical memory as often as not makes us forget to remember
that we wanted to remember something in the first place. Still,
whenever we are in the midst of some particularly enjoyable moment, we
often find ourselves, like my daughter, making a concentrated effort to
remember it so that we can enjoy that experience once again later on as a
nostalgic memory. But does this intentional act of remembrance really
work? Is it possible to willfully create, in the present, a nostalgic
memory to be enjoyed in the future?
The question of how much conscious control we have over the creation of our nostalgic memories
is neither a trivial nor a purely academic one. Psychological research
over the last couple of decades has found that, in addition to the
pleasure it brings, nostalgia offers a number of benefits to our mental
and even our physical well-being, so being able to intentionally create
nostalgic memories for future recollection could provide a reliable
means of accessing these benefits. A recent study in England attempted
to address this question of conscious control, and to explore how the
answer is related to one of the demonstrated psychological benefits of
nostalgia—optimism.
Biskas et al.
conducted a series of three studies investigating the role that
“savoring” (defined as “deep attention to a present experience in order
to capture it, retain it, and fully appreciate it”) actually plays in
the creation of nostalgic memories. In the first study, designed to
determine whether savoring a past event had led to present nostalgia for
it, participants were asked to write about a positive memory from their
past, and then indicate to what degree they savored the event when they
first experienced it. Once this had been determined, they were asked
to bring the event to mind and indicate the degree of nostalgia they
felt upon looking back at it. As anticipated, retrospective reports of
savoring were positively related to present nostalgia. The more the
participants said they had savored an event in the past, the more
nostalgia they felt for it in the present.
The second study similarly explored the relation between past
savoring and present nostalgia, but focused on a general time period
rather than a specific event, and was conducted in a context that
naturally prompted thoughts about that time period. The researchers
interviewed college alumni during an alumni event, asking them how much
they had savored the time they had spent in college, and how much
nostalgia they currently felt for that time period. As in the first
study, the degree to which participants reported savoring their college
years was positively related to the degree of nostalgia they reported
feeling for that period.
Looking forwards instead of backwards, the third study tested the
association between savoring of a present time period that was about to
end and subsequent nostalgia for that time period in the future. The
researchers approached college students on their graduation day and
asked them how much they had been savoring their final year of college
up to that point, and then contacted them again several months later to
ask how nostalgic they felt for their college experience, now in their
past. Once again, the degree to which participants consciously savored
the time period in question was directly related to the amount of
nostalgia they later felt for that time period.
Whether viewing the relationship between savoring and nostalgia
retrospectively or prospectively, all three studies found that conscious
and attentive enjoyment of an experience in the present creates the raw
material out of which future nostalgic memories are made. And
consistent with earlier research on the emotional benefits of nostalgia,
the nostalgic memories reported in these three studies were positively
associated with optimism. The college students who reported nostalgia
in regard to memories of experiences they had previously savored also
reported having a more optimistic outlook on the future. Biskas et al. suggest that savoring might thus “aid emotion regulation and, as such, improve well-being.”
Many of our most potent nostalgic experiences are purely involuntary,
triggered by some chance sensory stimulus in our environment—a familiar
smell,
for example, or an old song we haven’t heard for a long time. This
means that we have limited control over our nostalgia and the many
demonstrated benefits to our well-being that it offers. The finding
that savoring our present experiences is associated with later nostalgic
memories suggests we might have a little bit more control over our
nostalgia than we thought—if not, perhaps, with the "when" and "where"
of our retrieval of these memories, at least with the amount of raw
material available to be retrieved.
When my daughter looked out the car window last summer and savored
the blissful calm of the twilight in order to enjoy the memory later in
the year, it turns out that she had the right idea. There’s a good
chance she actually did create a future nostalgic memory on that
occasion, just as she intended. And with final exam period rapidly
approaching, she’ll soon have the opportunity to find out if it provides
her with the much needed moment of stress relief she hoped it would.
AUTHOR
Hal McDonald, Ph.D., a professor of literature and linguistics at Mars Hill University, is the author of the medical mystery The Anatomists.
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