Of course America today has its problems, but many indices of standards of living show the general population is better off now than it was 60 years ago. We live on average 10 years longer, the education rate is higher, as is homeownership. When it comes to crime, The Atlantic reported last year, “By virtually any metric, Americans now live in one of the least violent times in the nation’s history.”
So why do so many people see the past as better than today? For many of them, it may well have been. Middle- and working-class Americans seduced by appeals to earlier eras may have had higher-paying jobs with better benefits, greater financial security, and a more defined place in the community. Perhaps they were happier. For some, cultural changes since the Saturday night sock-hop may have only strengthened their beliefs that American values have frayed. But an innate psychological trait may also explain why people tend to view the past as better than today: nostalgia. [...]
Subsequent studies further contextualized nostalgia’s utility, showing that it’s frequently triggered by low moods, loneliness, and even a sense of meaninglessness. These triggers suggested that nostalgia might be a kind of defense mechanism, a way to maintain resiliency during periods of anxiety, despair, and existential distress. “What seems to be the case is that nostalgia can be an adaptive tool to deal with a lot of psychological threats,” says Wijnand van Tilburg, a social cognition researcher at King’s College London. [...]
In the study, “nostalgic memories” were simply memories that specifically induced nostalgia, as opposed to, say, ordinary memories that elicited minimal emotional response. Routledge explains that the various phenomena associated with autobiographical memory—chiefly psychological biases called fading affect and rosy retrospection—are ideally suited to induce nostalgia. “The way these memories works, works perfectly for nostalgia,” he says. In other words, the memories inducing nostalgia have been burnished and idealized over time, shorn of their negative aspects. But these recollections serve an important adaptive purpose. “When people are experiencing situations that challenge that sense of self and make them feel uncertain about life, they naturally recruit nostalgia as a way to restore that self-continuity,” Routledge says. [...]
In a study by Colorado State University psychologist Richard Walker in 1997, participants recorded and rated events based on how pleasant they were. They then reevaluated those events, respectively, three months, one-and-a-half years, and four-and-a-half years later, again rating them based on pleasantness. Researchers found that while participants rated most experiences as less extreme over time—either less pleasant or less unpleasant—negative emotions faded faster. Walker’s findings have been corroborated many times over, including a study in 2014 that showed fading affect bias prevalent worldwide, in countries ranging from Australia to Germany to Ghana.
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