Speaking of Psychology - Does Nostalgia Have a Psychological Purpose? with Krystine Batcho, PhD

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

What psychological purpose does nostalgia serve? Is it good or bad? Are we more nostalgic today in our hectic, connected world? Is there such a thing as the “good ‘ol days”? Here to help explain is Dr. Krystine Batcho, professor of psychology at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York. She’s an expert on nostalgia and developed the Nostalgia Inventory, a survey that assesses proneness to personal nostalgia. Join us online August 6-8 for APA 2020 Virtual. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Have a break. Have a Kit Kat. Hello, and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a biweekly podcast from the American Psychological Association that explores the connections between, psychological science and everyday life. I'm your host, Caitlin Luna. Nostalgia, that longing feeling for the past when things seemed better, easier, and more fun. It's the feeling behind countless number one hits. It's what's resurrecting old TV shows and being capitalized on by politicians. We all know the feeling. Some of us may be a little too well. What psychological purpose does nostalgia serve? Is it good or

bad? Are we more nostalgic today in our hectic connected world? And is there such a thing as the good old days? Here to help explain is Dr. Christine Batcho, professor of psychology at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. She's an expert on nostalgia and developed the nostalgia inventory, a survey that assesses pronest to personal nostalgia. Welcome, Dr. Batcho. Thank you so much. I love talking about nostalgia. Thank you for inviting me. Absolutely. Absolutely. We look forward to hearing all about it. So as a psychologist and a researcher of nostalgia, how do you describe nostalgia? That's a very important question because today many people are researching nostalgia, but they might be using the word differently. So in fact, some people are probably talking about

a slightly different experience or construct. I'm pretty faithful to the origins of the word nostalgia. The word was coined or invented a long time ago, over 300 years ago, And originally it designated homesickness. Well, semantic drift over the centuries has broadened that to the notion of longing for or missing aspects of a person's personal lived past. And so that is the kind of nostalgia, or that is what I mean when I talk about nostalgia. And it's a wonderfully complex paradoxical experience. Can you talk about the role of nostalgia and the human psyche? Why do we have that feeling? Most of the research available today, including my research, argues that nostalgia serves a number of functions.

And the thing that ties them all together is that nostalgia is an emotional experience that unifies. So one example of this is it helps to unite our sense of who we are, our self, our ideas, identity over time. Because over time, we change constantly. We change in incredible ways. We're not anywhere near the same as we were when we were three years old, for example. And nostalgia by motivating us to remember the past in our own life helps to unite us to that authentic self and remind us of who we have been and then compare that to who we feel we are today. and that gives us a sense of who we want to be down the road in the future. The other way that nostalgia serves an essential psychological function

is that it is a highly social emotion. It connects us to other people, and it does that in so many beautiful ways. In the beginning, when we're very young, it's part of what bonds us to the most important people in our life, our parents, our siblings, our friends. And as we go through life, it can broaden out and extend to a wider sphere of the people we interact with. So it's a social connectedness phenomenon. And nostalgia is, in that sense, a very healthy pro-social emotion. The other way that it's

unifying is that it helps us to unify what otherwise would be felt or experienced by us as conflicts. In itself, it is somewhat of a conflict because, as I define it, it is a bitter, sweet emotion. It's sweet because we're remembering the best times, the good times of our life. The bitterness comes from the sense that we know for sure that we can never really regain them. They're gone forever. The irreversibility of time means that we absolutely cannot go back in time. So it helps us to deal with the conflict of the bitter longing for what can never be again, together with the sweetness of having experienced it and being able to revisit it and relive it again. You've explained that there's two different kinds of nostalgia. There's the personal, which we just touched on and historical.

Can you explain what each one is? In fact, today, many people are arguing that there are even more varieties of nostalgia. But when I first began collecting empirical evidence in the mid-1990s, I knew that another inventory existed. It was put together by a psychologist named Holbrook. And that one contained items that were more oriented toward history and society across the years. That is the type that I refer to as historical nostalgia. the evidence shows that someone who experiences historical nostalgia might even have an emotional attachment to or longing for times in history that predate their own birth.

That is very different from personal nostalgia. Personal nostalgia means that you are longing for or feeling good about aspects of your life that you already lived through and have stored in your memory. memory. My original data in the beginning demonstrated that individuals can be experiencing a lot of one type of the nostalgia and maybe not much of the other. They're relatively non-correlated or independent phenomena. They're not the same thing. Your research has shown that nostalgia can be a stabilizing force and comfort us during times of change and transition. Can you explain that a bit more? Yes, change, whether it's good change or negative change, we know that it's stressful.

It's very difficult to grasp change because in some sense, at a very deep psychic level, change threatens us. It's a little frightening because we're not 100% sure that we can control it. And one of the most important aspects of being a healthy human being is having a sense that you are in control of things. So when things start to change either very substantially, such as major events in a person's life, getting married or getting divorced, getting a new career, going back to school or graduating from school, it's comforting to have a nostalgic feeling for the past that reminds us that although we don't know what the future is going to bring, what we do know is that we know who we have been and who we really are. So it's a very comforting emotion. It also brings back, it stimulates, memories of the times when we were accepted and loved unconditionally. That is such a powerfully comforting phenomenon, knowing that there was a time in life when we didn't have to earn our love or we didn't deserve it because we earned a certain amount of money or we were successful in a certain venue.

our parents, for example, or our siblings or our friends, simply loved us unconditionally. That is a wonderfully comforting feeling when we're undergoing any kind of turmoil in our personal lives. So when you're going through a difficult experience or a new change, as you mentioned, you might find yourself thinking a lot about memories from the past. Is that correct to say? Absolutely. For instance, many people will tell you that if they're at a major event, graduation, a wedding, christening for a baby. Very often, what is happening is they have an entire flood of their mind with all the nostalgic memories that come to be relevant to this situation. So when a parent is sitting in the audience and they watch their child graduate, they cannot help. But remember when

that child was little and needed help putting their shoes on and thinking how far that person has come in life. So in a way, nostalgia is kind of like a measurement. It's a way we keep track of things. We monitor progress through life, not just for ourselves, but even for other people to whom we are very attached. I want to flip that on the other side a bit and talk about today's political climate where many people are longing to return to, what I would say is quote, the good old days in the United States. What does this say to you as a nostalgia researcher? It tells me a couple of things. First of all, different people have that kind of sense of wishing for the good old days for different reasons. So let's say someone who is old enough to have lived through, for example,

the 1950s, they might actually be experiencing some personal nostalgia because they're remembering how they and their family celebrated holidays or what it was like going to school in the mid-1950s. that phenomenon would be very, very different for a younger person. For example, a member of the millennial generation, for them, it's not personal nostalgia. It's historical. And historical nostalgia, my research suggests, is more likely triggered by dissatisfaction with the present. So if people are unhappy for any reason with how things are today, they're more likely than to experience this sense that things must have been better in the way.

the past and how far they have to go in terms of their longing can depend upon how much they know about history. Some of this gets handed down through stories from grandparents and some of it gets handed down through films that people watch or even literature that they've read. So someone could, for example, become enamored of a period in history such as Victorian days, not because they've lived through them obviously, but because they have become romanticized and idealized in a way in literature and in film. And that kind of phenomenon is very, very different from someone who says, I think that today is a very stressful time. And when I was growing up, I think it was less stressful. And the reason for that is because our memories are not faithful. They're not

accurate to what things really were like. They're our impressions of what things were like in the past. Yeah, I want to expand on that a little bit more. So do you think people are remembering the quote, good old days accurately? Because a lot of people might say, you know, life is worse. And this is the United States speaking of. It's worse than it was 60 years ago, the 1950s are glamorized as being this ideal moment in time, probably immortalize in a show like leave it leave it to beaver or something like that. But, you know, when you think about that, the experience in the 1950s of some people in America was probably wonderful, but the experience of other people at that time was probably terrible. I'm thinking, you know, white Americans

experienced the 1950s in one way. People of color experienced it in a totally different way. Women experienced it in some, and in one way, men experienced it another. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like, are we overly romanticizing that period of time in the country today? That is an excellent question and we have decades of cognitive research that show that the general default is that memories are not accurate. And that's true for all kinds of memories. And when we think about retrieving memories, so for example, if we want to retrieve, what do we remember about the 1950s or whatever period in history that we've lived through, we can be very selective. So when you think about a time period in society,

It has so many components to it. So one individual might be nostalgic for that time, but they're not thinking about things like racism or discrimination or even conflict. For example, the baby boomers, some of them were hippies during the 1960s. And when they get nostalgic for Woodstock, they might not be really thinking about the anti-war protests and some of the violence that occurred at that time. they're selecting out the parts of that. So they might be thinking about, oh, I had wonderful friendships then.

Or they might be thinking about some of their early romantic relationships. So we pick and choose. The memory process not only is selective, but it also distorts to some extent. So we do idealize things on occasion. By the way, this is a two-edged sword. because just as we can idealize and romanticize and therefore distort the accuracy of memories, we can go in the other direction. And one of the reasons I find nostalgia is so fascinating is because I have an interest in connecting

the theoretical research in the laboratory to people's lived experiences because of clinical applications. And some people find that their memories tend to go the other direction. When they're remembering the past, they're always thinking of the negative aspects. And then they might distort that and say, oh, as a child, my parents didn't love me. They didn't give me toys. They were very mean to me. My friends bullied me.

But actually, if we had a videotape of their childhoods, we might find that that's not necessarily totally accurate. Their childhood might not have been any different from their siblings' childhood. but that makes us ask a question, then why are some individuals selectively romanticizing the past, whereas others are actually exaggerating its negative aspects that led me in the early research that I did to look at generations to some extent. And I was interested in looking at the greatest generation, many of whom grew up as children, during the Great Depression, and I interviewed people who had experienced

quite a bit of financial hardship, and when they talked about their memories of their childhood, they in fact did talk about only being able to eat bread on many days. And that idea that they recognized that their childhood was one of deprivation, one of hardship, you might say, does that factor into how nostalgic they would be then

for those days? And the answer to that is much more complicated than I thought it would be. I thought that those individuals would have the least amount of nostalgia. It turns out that it probably depends upon two things. One is an individual's personality or their psychological well-being in the first place. So if you have two individuals, one of whom is really happy in their current life and they're emotionally doing just fine, they might go back and remember bad things and then laugh about them and say, wow, we've come a long way since those days, haven't we? Now we have a big Thanksgiving feast and we have all this food

and I remember being six years old and not having enough to eat. Whereas someone else who is suffering from something like depression or an anxiety disorder, they might go back and think about the past and then let that further sadden them rather than make them happy by completely. parisand with how far they've come. Well, that's really fascinating. That was one thing I did want to touch on a little bit more, too, is like, why do we remember something so positively, something so negatively? Because, you know, you said it might depend on the person's mental state, how they're doing

in life, but it's just so fascinating how we can look back on an experience and say, and even if it was kind of bad, you can go back and look in an experience and focus on the positive aspects of it. Yes, exactly. And that is fascinating. I think that there are at least two levels at which you can ask that question. One level is when someone is sitting in private just reminiscing. And there it is very important to think about their current mood state because we have mood

dependent memory effects. So when you're sad, you're more likely to think of sad memories. When you're happy, you're more likely to think of happy memories. But on the other level, we have a social element. And nostalgia is a social experience. And so if you're hanging out with friends and reminiscing about the days back in high school or college or whatever, now depending upon what your friends say in that social setting, that might trigger you to either be more positive or more negative. So in a way, one really good piece of advice is for people who are starting to feel stressed out or lonely or sad, it's very important to try to gravitation. toward people who stimulate the best of what you can bring to today from your past.

In other words, if someone is always bringing you down by saying, oh, but do you remember when we didn't have enough to eat? Do you remember when somebody was unkind to us? That person is an influence on our memory retrieval processes, and we're more likely then to experience nostalgia in a negative way. On the other hand, if you're hanging out with people who are laughing about the funny times and the times when something embarrassing happened, everyone loves to share their most embarrassing moment. And in that social setting when it's jovial and people are feeling good about it and finding the lessons learned from it, now that might bring out the best of nostalgic memory. It's interesting that a lot of it's dependent upon whom is around you.

that's really interesting. Yes, it is. And I think it's of great importance today because some of the current survey data have suggested that especially for the millennial generation and other adults, there is a great deal of reported loneliness. And some people suspect that has a little bit to do, not entirely, but a little bit to do with the internet and cyberspace and social media. And the argument is there are 24 hours in a day.

So how do you spend those hours? Well, people who grew up before the Internet, their days were spent largely either alone or with other people face to face. That's no longer the case. We have an incredible amount of time spent in cyberspace. So even when you're connecting to other people in a social way, you're connecting to them at a distance. And I believe that the psychological distancing can make people feel lonelier than they would have felt had they spent exactly the same amount of time having a cup of coffee with that person face to face. So I think that the social element needs to be explored and researched even more heavily given the great proportion of time that young adults are spending not in actual face-to-face but in virtual reality. Yes, there's so many throwbacks, if you will, happening today.

Like I'm talking about the TV shows that are being rebooted that were popular in the 90s. You know, bands from Long ago have reunited and are going out on tour. You know, there's places like BuzzFeed often feature, you know, top 20 lists like top 20 toys from the 1980s, that sort of thing. And people really flock to that and want to share their memories of a certain toy. So I was wondering from your perspective what that tells us about people today. Is it really because of we're hyperconnected all the time? Or could it be people are more nostalgic today? Is it we have access to sharing these memories with a lot of people all at once through the internet?

That is a complicated question. And I think there are several reasons for the retro phenomenon that has become somewhat of a fad. I think on one level, it tells us, based upon the research, that there's something people feel is missing in the current lifestyle. and that what is missing might be this social connectedness up close and personal. On the other hand, it might be that people are losing track of their sense of purpose and meaning. And nostalgia, one of its healthiest functions, is to keep us on track with regard to the meaningfulness of our lives. Data suggests that nostalgia facilitates our understanding of meaning in life. And so in a way, when we look at all the reboots and people going back to the past, it might be telling us that people aren't 100% satisfied with the current lifestyle.

There's something that might be missing. On a much more pragmatic lower level, you might argue that a lot of this is because we can. Suddenly, it has become so accessible. With social media, all it takes is for one person to post. something from the past and raise a question, do you remember, do you remember watching this old TV show, or I wonder whatever happened to, and before you know it, it can go viral.

And we have the technology now to really immerse people in these reboots and then spinoffs, et cetera, et cetera. So until it stops making profit, I think we're going to see this for a while, I don't think it's going to continue on unabated, however. Is there some element of infectiousness to nostalgia? I mean, we talked about obviously people have more access to seeing these things online and they can share it.

But even people, if they're physically together, does it become something that spreads from one person to the other? I believe it can be. And actually, I wish it were more infectious. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. I think it's infectious when you have a group of people who have some shared experience. So the best example of that are when a group of friends are reminiscing about their antics, the things they did as either teenagers or children or what have you. So it's a bonding experience.

Another example of that is we know from current research that sports fans love to do that. They talk about the games that they enjoyed and when their team was victorious. So when you have a common bond, it can be very infectious. and it's like a domino. One memory triggers another, triggers another. The reason why I say I wish it were more infectious is because that can break down when you have a group of people

who do not have shared experiences to be nostalgic about. So suddenly, if you have one individual wanting to reminisce about his or her own past experiences, but no one else in that group remembers those things or lived through those things, or lived through those things. In the long time ago, people talked about generation gaps.

So if someone is talking about the 1950s, a millennial says, oh, I don't even know what you're talking about. I don't know that TV show. I never saw that. This can actually alienate other people because people don't necessarily want to hear about your nostalgic memories. They want to share their own. And that's why I say,

I wish it were a little more open because we have so much to learn from one another's nostalgic memories. And that's why I encourage people when they find themselves in a situation such as you're reminiscing about your past and other people start drifting away because they're bored, you might start asking them about theirs and start a conversation, a dialogue. And in that sense, you can broaden it out a little more. Can nostalgia be a destructive force that can really incubate anger, isolation, or hatred? It seems like it could have that potential. Most of the research suggests that nostalgia is aligned with or correlated with very soft pro-social emotions, such as compassion, empathy, altruism.

And so it's unlikely, generally, to be associated. with hostility or anger. Can it be isolating? That's a very interesting question because you could argue that if you find yourself the victim of or a survivor of very unique circumstances, and now you're nostalgic for a time before that,

other people might not be able to relate to you and you might or might not have the motivation to leave your past behind. That led me to doing a qualitative analysis of memoirs of people who had survived under wartime conditions. And what's particularly interesting to me is that when those individuals recount how they had to adapt to significant change and in some cases became relocated, not by their own choice, but because of conditions of war, they became, for example,

refugees or they had to emigrate. Initially, in the early stages, they almost had a psychic block against accepting a new culture, a new life. And they almost wallowed in their nostalgic memories of the past and found as time went on that that became very isolating because the people they were among were not able to share that. And what leads ultimately to a healthy kind of nostalgia is the one where the positive pro-social aspects of nostalgia can reconnect us now, not just to people in our past, but to the people we're dealing with today. And that is possible. That can happen.

All the memoirs that I've studied have demonstrated how that happens. It happens by confronting the past with the current situation and trying to find what were the lessons we learned from our past, that we can now tweak, update, customize, and use to cope with the turmoil and the conflict and the change that we've gone through to sort of be more optimistic toward the future. The other aspect of this is that some people are looking at what they might refer to as social nostalgia and looking at groups and having designs where they're comparing intra-group versus inter-group. And in those situations, you're perhaps talking about a slightly different phenomenon. Can nostalgia hold us back by keeping us dwelling on the past?

I mean, can it really, you know, impede what is happening in the current moment and in the future? When I began collecting data, that was the prevailing belief among theorists. Before people started collecting empirical evidence, it was just assumed. In fact, much of the psychoanalytic thought that, predated behaviorism and modern or contemporary social science argued that it would be regressive to try to revisit your past and that the danger was that if your past is better than you're present, why would you not just then stay there? Well, once I began collecting data and then other people, of course, have extended this even worldwide, what we find is that, generally

speaking, that is not what happens. And I've thought a great deal about this. and most of the research I've covered, it looks like this. Nostalgia is bittersweet. Why did it evolve that way? If you take a social evolutionary perspective, it would make perfect sense that we would want to revisit our past so that we always learn from it. But at the same time, we don't want to stay in the past.

So the sweetness entices us to revisit our past. But once we're there, the bitterness of knowing that actually it no longer exists reminds us that we must return to the present and that makes us want to return to the present. So my argument is that it's almost never, at least the research suggests, it would be extremely unlikely for someone to want to remain in the past. If someone found themselves being trapped in the past, that suggests that they're experiencing some sort of difficulty. It could be that they're undergoing a very intolerable current situation in their life, and they might seek counseling to help them deal with that, because they're using nostalgia then or their memories as an escape. But for the most part, most people, my research shows,

because nostalgia is a social emotion, it is actually correlated with or associated with healthy coping mechanisms, such as seeking out others when you're having, difficulties. We, in fact, when we revisit our memories, we try to remember how other people in our lives solved problems in the past and then use that as a role model for how we want to solve the problems we're experiencing today. So it's generally healthy. And how does age affect a person's feelings of nostalgia? Is it across the board? Is it older or younger people? My original data set suggested that there is a bump in nostalgia where it peaks, not in old age, as many theorists

would have expected, but peaks in young adulthood. Most theorists argue that the reason for that increase in nostalgia during young adulthood is because it's such a pivotal developmental transitional period. It is literally the time when a person has one foot still back in their childhood and one foot anticipating their move into complete adult independence. And so while they have a little bit of their identity still aligned with or connected to their paths, they are eager to forge ahead. And for that reason, there is a lot more frequency of nostalgic reminiscence going on because there's a bit of a reluctance out of trepidation.

will my future be as wonderful and as rosy as my past was? So we know that transitional periods, including developmental ones, trigger nostalgia. Some newer research is suggesting that there might be a smaller but another bump in older individuals, and that is because they're watching a significant change in their own lifestyle from when they were, for example, in terms of physical well-being or physical health, completely in their prime of their health, versus looking ahead toward aging as, well, I might not be able to be as active as I once had been, or maybe they're suffering with physical conditions or disorders that limit some of their lifestyle. And for that reason, they would also become more nostalgic.

Do you think nostalgia has always been a part of the human experience? When I first did literature review in order to put together my nostalgia inventory, I was really impressed to find references to nostalgia before it ever had the name, nostalgia. And those references go back thousands of years. So you can find in literature all kinds of examples of people who were, in some sense, nostalgic for sometimes their home or their homeland. And that fits the original definition of it as homesickness, but also in terms of longing for the past. And therefore, the argument is that it's universal. It probably is part of the human experience.

So it's always been there as a potential. And it cuts across all cultures and all historical time periods. Yeah, that's really fascinating. Also, now you've touched on it a few times, can you explain your nostalgia inventory and how you use it in your research? Yes, because I define nostalgia as a longing for or a missing for one's personal past, I comprised it of items that ask people to what extent they miss something from their past. Some of the items on the inventory are really conceptual or abstract, such as missing the innocence of childhood or missing the freedom from having responsibilities.

Others are more concrete, missing your toys, missing pets that you had in your former days. And it turns out that there really are probably two factors within it, one which is a more concrete set of things that we miss from our past, and the other being a little more abstract, a little more conceptual. And I argue that nostalgia is an umbrella that covers both of those. my inventory measures it in a way that connects people to missing their own past and is not correlated with inventories that look at it more as a historical type of experience or social event. I want to also go back to, we were talking a little bit more about the memories, how they can be

both positive and negative. Yes. In a previous episode we did, episode 91, how memory can be manipulated. we featured memory expert Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, and she explained that memories can be manipulated under the right conditions. So what are your thoughts on that and how that can affect our levels of nostalgia about the past? I agree. I agree completely. And I think that to some extent, how we interpret our past, how we comprehend it can change. We can have retrospective comprehension or interpretation of our memories that depends upon what purpose we're trying to serve.

in our present. So if someone is trying to find a reason to feel loved or worthy of love, then they might have a guided sense through their own nostalgic memories of looking for the times when they were loved and maybe even doing an analysis of, so I wonder if something went wrong and was I partly responsible or do I just have bad luck? So a good example of that would be if someone is undergoing a breakup of an important relationship, now they might be motivated to have nostalgic memories either of that relationship and saying, gee, how did we come to this unhappiness when we were so passionately in love in the beginning? And there are researchers now looking at relationship nostalgia. It can be helpful to some extent, but on the other hand, if you're

using it as a way of almost arguing that you want out of the relationship and you say, well, the reason why I am leaving this relationship is because when I compare my satisfaction with it today with how much joy I got out of it in the beginning, I see that it's been all downhill. So I'm arguing here that our motivations can actually influence how we remember the past and how we interpret the meaningfulness of our past. And just to wrap this up for our listeners, we've touched on a lot of different areas of nostalgia. And I want to know, is there a way for society to collectively use nostalgia to better itself? Like, how can we tangibly benefit from it? I think it's really a very important resource and it's under-use.

utilized. I say that even though we have all these spin-offs and reboots and we have a lot of nostalgia, if you use a search engine for the term nostalgia, it is incredible. You can find maybe near 300 million hits on that search engine, but just because you have a lot of something doesn't mean that you're using it effectively. We could start to incorporate it more effectively, I believe, not just in media. That's one great vehicle. We can also look at how we can use it in social media in cyberspace, but also in education and perhaps in parenting. One of the healthiest forms of nostalgia throughout human history has always been to connect each generation to the next. And so in that sort of bond, you pass down to the next generation the best of the past. Just because

we are oriented toward progress doesn't mean that there isn't something of value that we might have forgotten from the past. A good example of that would be to say that all the technology that has been developed recently is absolutely wonderful. All the progress in medicine has saved so many lives. We are almost obsessed with future-oriented progress. The only risk that brings us is the risk of wondering whether we've made certain trade-offs. Are there things that were present before that we're either not doing as effectively today? For example, are we helping young children develop empathy for others and empathy for those who are different from themselves as effectively as we might? So there are many possible practical tools. It used to be that when parents had

children, they relived their own nostalgic memories by reading children's books that they had read to them, to their own children, and then when they became grandparents doing the same for their grandchildren, because the millennials have delayed marriage and children and family size has shrunk, we might be having a little bit of a deficit in those kinds of intergenerational transmissions. I think that we can learn a lot from that and wonder how we can now tweak that and replicate it today so that we don't just look across generations, but we look across cultures, and we look across differences of opinion and diverse ideologies. So what can we find that is a common bond so that we can get along with one another better than perhaps some

people think we're getting along with one another today because differences can be divisive? Nostalgia could be, in a way, part of the cure because nostalgia does the opposite and Instead of dividing, it unites. So there's a lot of great things that nostalgia can do for us if we just hone in on that and try to utilize it as you just mentioned. Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Bacho. We really appreciate your time.

This has been a really very interesting topic, and I think our listeners will really enjoy. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it myself. Before we go, I want to remind you that we want to hear from you. You can email your comments and ideas to speaking of psychology at APA.org. That's speaking of psychology, all one word.org. And please consider giving us a rating in iTunes. It really helps.

Speaking of Psychology is part of the APA podcast network, which includes other informative podcasts like APA journals dialogue about new psychological research and progress notes about the practice of psychology. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also go to our website speakingof psychology.org to listen to more episodes. I'm Caitlin Luna with the American Psychological Association.