The Rewarding Consequences of Nostalgia

This event is part of a series of Psychology seminars that regularly occurs during the Autumn and Spring terms.

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for one’s meaningful past, is more than a bittersweet reflection on bygone experiences. Far from being a passive recollection of the past, nostalgia serves a regulatory function, helping people counteract adverse psychological states and restore psychological equilibrium. It does so by increasing approach motivation, encouraging people to pursue desirable outcomes and engage in goal-directed behaviour. However, the processes through which nostalgia exerts these motivational effects remain poorly understood. One possibility is that nostalgia activates the positive valence system, a collection of psychological processes involved in wanting, anticipating, pursuing, and responding to rewards.

In this talk, Nicholas Kelley will present findings from five studies examining nostalgia's influence on these processes at both the psychological and neural levels. In two preregistered studies, trait nostalgia was positively associated with all seven dimensions of the positive valence system, suggesting a broad relationship with reward-related motivation and experience. Experimentally induced nostalgia had more selective effects, increasing three processes most proximal to reward receipt: reward valuation, action selection, and initial reward responsiveness.

Building on these findings, Kelley conducted three further experiments in the United Kingdom and China using electroencephalography to examine the rapid neural evaluation of rewarding outcomes. He focused on the reward positivity, an event-related potential that emerges approximately 200–350 milliseconds after feedback and signals favourable outcomes during goal pursuit. Across different nostalgia inductions and reward tasks, nostalgia enhanced the reward positivity.

Together, these findings extend the regulatory model of nostalgia by suggesting that its effects on approach motivation involve rapid changes in how the brain evaluates rewarding outcomes, emerging within a fraction of a second of reward receipt.