The trick to long-lasting friendships, it turns out, may be nostalgia. According to a new study in Cognition and Emotion, people who think more about the past tend to have more friends, and it may be because they are more motivated to maintain their friendships over time.
“People who feel nostalgic more often and value those memories are more aware of their important relationships and the need to nurture them,” said Kuan-Ju Huang, a study author and a psychology graduate student at Kyoto University, according to a press release. “This means [their] friendships may be more likely to last, even as [they] get older.”
According to Huang, long-lasting friendships improve our overall well-being, helping us live happy and healthy lives. If nostalgia plays a part in maintaining those friendships, then it may be best to live a little in the past, at least from time to time.
Friends For a Longer Life
Studies show that people with friends are happier, healthier, and more satisfied with their lives. They’re also prone to living longer. But what helps us hold onto our friendships over time, when friendships tend to fade as we age?
To understand what ties us together, Huang and a colleague — Ya-Hui Chang, then a graduate student at the State University of New York at Buffalo — turned to nostalgia, conducting a series of studies on around 1,500 individuals. Considered collectively, these studies suggest that the tendency to think about the past may motivate people to appreciate and, thus, maintain their friendships, leaving them with more friends in the long term.
Read More: Friendship Research Is Getting An Update – And That’s Key For Dealing With The Loneliness Epidemic
Linking Nostalgia and Friendship
To arrive at these results, Huang and Chang relied on surveys. Gathering a group of undergraduate students from the U.S., they asked the students about the frequency of their feelings of nostalgia and the number of their friends, as well as their motivation to make and maintain friendships.
Their responses revealed that the participants, who were an average age of 19, had about seven people who they considered their “closest” friends and about 21 people who they considered their “close” and “less-close” friends (“Closest friendships,” in particular, were classified as friendships that “it would be hard to imagine life without.”)
Further analysis of their responses suggested that the participants who felt more feelings of nostalgia tended to have more friends and feel more motivated to make and maintain friendships. A follow-up survey of non-student adults from the U.S. offered a similar result. Though the participants, whose average age was 40, maintained fewer friendships (with only five “closest” friends and 14 “close” and “less-close” friends on average), the same patterns of nostalgia and friendship prevailed.
Huang and Chang found additional support for these results in the responses of the Longitudinal Internet Studies for Social Sciences (LISS) survey, which showed that participants who were more nostalgic maintained more of their strong social ties over a period of seven years than participants who were not.
These responses, collected from participants in the Netherlands, also revealed that the participants became more nostalgic as they aged, moving from an average score of 3.95 to an average score of 4.21 on a seven-point nostalgia scale.
Read More: Healthy, High-Quality Relationships Matter More Than We Think
Nostalgia For All Ages
Though it might seem strange to study nostalgia in young as well as older adults, Huang and Chang’s studies suggest that feelings of nostalgia are found in adults of all ages, albeit to different degrees.
“There is evidence showing that young adults report nostalgic feelings slightly more frequently than middle-aged adults, while older adults report dramatically higher levels of nostalgia,” Huang said in the press release.
Whatever the age, however, nostalgia appears to be tied to the same social outcomes: more friends and more motivation to maintain those friendships — for today, for tomorrow, and for yesterday, too.
Read More: Do Relationships Affect Our Physical Health?
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Cognition and Emotion. The Past That Ties Us Together: Nostalgia Strengthens Social Networks
Frontiers in Psychology. Adult Friendship and Wellbeing: A Systematic Review with Practical Implications
Perspectives on Psychological Science. Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality: A Meta-Analytic Review
Sam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
