Nostalgia increases psychological richness in life

Nostalgia is a bittersweet emotion that has been reliably shown to increase feelings that life is meaningful—which importantly relates to reduced mental illness. But meaning in life is multi-faceted and scholars have not yet explored which facets of meaning nostalgia increases. Furthermore, scholars have not yet investigated whether nostalgia enhances another form of the good life, termed psychological richness in life. The psychologically rich life involves diverse perspective-changing experiences, frequently entailing intense and complex emotions. Because nostalgic memories are often of momentous and self-defining life events, such as weddings and graduations, it is plausible that nostalgic recollections increase psychological richness in life. Thus, the present research addressed these two gaps in the literature by seeking to determine which facets of meaning in life nostalgia increases and whether nostalgia also enhances psychological richness in life. We tested these novel research questions by conducting three between-subjects experiments (Study 1 N = 640, Study 2 N = 201, Study 3 N = 1007), which include the largest known sample sizes ever obtained in nostalgia experimentation. We showed, for the first time, that nostalgia reliably enhances perceptions that life is psychologically rich. We found mixed evidence regarding nostalgia’s effects on meaning in life (and its facets). In Study 1, we failed to conceptually replicate prior findings that nostalgia increases meaning in life—we also did not find evidence that it increases meaning in life facets. However, in Studies 2 and 3, a more direct replication attempt of the widely-reported effect of nostalgia on meaning in life, as well as the use of an alternative measure to detect an effect on the facets of meaning in life, was successful. Using these alternative measures, we found evidence that nostalgia boosts meaning in life, and its three facets of coherence, purpose, and mattering. The implications of our findings are discussed.