THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYthoughts actually have any comforting effect. This evidence was provided
by follow-up studies which showed that instructing participants to think
about a nostalgic event from the past led them to feel in a better mood,
and more loved and protected. Consistent with this, other research has
shown that nostalgic thoughts tend to involve meaningful others, and
often follow a so-called “redemptive sequence” where everything works
out alright in the end.
Apart from boosting mood and guarding against loneliness, it seems
that nostalgia could also ameliorate existential angst. In another study,
participants were primed to think about their own mortality – for
example, by asking them to imagine what will happen to their body when
they die. Those participants who were more prone to nostalgia, or who
were instructed to engage in some nostalgic reminiscence, subsequently
had fewer death-related thoughts. “Regarded throughout centuries as
a psychological ailment”, Sedikides and his colleagues wrote in 2008,
“nostalgia is now emerging as a fundamental human strength”.
Infantile amnesia and the reminiscence bump
Few people can remember anything from before they were about
three and a half to four years of age, a phenomenon labelled “infantile
amnesia”. Experts still don’t really know why this is. It’s not that
memory doesn’t work before that age. Three-year-olds will happily and
accurately talk about events that happened over a year ago. In a 2005
study, Carole Peterson at the Memorial University of Newfoundland
in Canada investigated whether younger children have earlier first
memories than older children. They found that children aged between
six and nine years have slightly earlier memories – from about age three
and up – but that the earliest memories of young people between ten
and nineteen start at around the age of three and a half. The researchers
couldn’t explain what happened at age ten to prevent access to
memories that were available at age nine. Another curious character-
istic of memory across the lifespan is the “reminiscence bump”. This
is our tendency to have better recall for events that occurred during
our late teens and early twenties compared with any other time of life.
Some commentators have suggested that this is simply because events
from those years are more salient – your first kiss, your first driving
lesson and so on are bound to be more memorable than later examples.
However a 2008 study by Steve Janssen showed that people of all ages
were better at remembering impersonal news-related events that had
occurred during their late teens and early twenties, thus suggesting
memory for that period of our lives really is superior.