From nostalgia, through communion, to psychological benefits: the moderating role of narcissism

ABSTRACT

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for one’s past, is a social, self-relevant, and ambivalent (albeit predominantly positive) emotion. It fosters tenderness, social connectedness, life meaning, self-continuity, self-esteem, optimism, and inspiration. In two experiments, we manipulated nostalgia and examined mechanisms underlying its psychological benefits. Two communal mechanisms emerged consistently: love-friendship and unity-togetherness. The findings establish the sociality of nostalgia, identifying the communion mechanisms of love-friendship and unity-togetherness as mediators of nostalgia’s benefits. The findings also identified narcissism as a moderator of nostalgia’s benefits: although both high and low narcissists gained benefits via increased communion, high narcissists also experienced a reduction in some benefits due to decreased agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Nostalgia
• communion
• agency
• psychological benefits
• narcissism

Acknowledgments

We want to thank Anna Kaczmarek, Eliza Witkowska, and Jakub Wlodek for their assistance with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

All data and materials are publicly available via Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/jv8pu/?view_only=ea630311f5e647a5acc9f08e3aac438a

Ethics approval statement

The experiments reported in this article received ethics approval from the Research Ethics Committee of SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Notes

1. For exploratory purposes, we also assessed trait nostalgia with the Southampton Nostalgia Scale (Barrett et al., 2010; Sedikides, Wildschut, Routledge, & Arndt, 2015) administered after the psychological benefits measures but before the demographic questions. We did not analyze the corresponding data.

2. For exploration, we administered the Southampton Nostalgia Scale, as in Experiment 1, right before the demographic questions. We did not analyze these data.

3. The correlation between narcissism and the average of the four agentic themes was r(300) = .41, p < .001. The correlation between narcissism and the average of the four communal themes was r(300) = .17, p < .001. The difference between these correlations was statistically significant, Steiger’s z = 4.12, p < .001.

4. The pattern of associations between narcissism and psychological functions suggests that narcissism was more strongly associated with relatively agentic functions (self-esteem, optimism, inspiration) than with relatively communal functions (tenderness, connectedness). The correlation between narcissism and the average of the three agentic functions was r(300) = .25, p < .001. The correlations between narcissism and the average of the two communal functions was r(300) = -.02, p = .710. The difference between these correlations was statistically significant, Steiger’s z = 4.81, p < .001. We did not include life meaning and self-continuity in this analysis, because they cannot be clearly designated as relatively more agentic or communal.

5. We did not model direct-effect moderation, because the Nostalgia × Narcissism interaction was not statistically significant for any of the benefits. We also did not model second-stage moderation, after initial analyses (PROCESS Model 58) revealed that the paths from agency and communion to the benefits were not significantly moderated by narcissism.

6. First-stage moderated mediation analyses in which we entered the communion composite and agency composite as parallel mediators (PROCESS Model 7) yielded nearly identical results. For communion, the indices of moderated mediation were not statistically significant in any analysis. For agency, the indices of moderated mediation were significant in the analyses of self-esteem, optimism, and inspiration (but no longer in the analysis of life meaning).

7. In analyses without mediators, the main effects of nostalgia on self-esteem and inspiration were trending (Table 3). In analyses with the agency composite as mediator, these nostalgia main effects were significant. That is, controlling for agency rendered the positive effects of nostalgia on self-esteem (F[1, 296] = 4.67, p = .031, η² = .02) and inspiration (F[1, 296] = 4.85, p = .028, η² = .02) significant. The change in p-values occurred around the .05 boundary (from .065 to .031 for self-esteem; from .069 to .028 for inspiration) and can be attributed to the fact that the agency composite was numerically lower in the nostalgia (than control) condition, and was positively associated with self-esteem and inspiration. Accordingly, controlling for the nominally lower agency score in the nostalgia (than control) condition strengthened slightly the nostalgia effect on self-esteem and inspiration.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education under SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities BST Research Grant WP/2016/B/26