Project plan
Keywords: Nostalgia, Spiritual Landmark, Psychological Functions
Summary
Memory is a function in which the mind recalls past actions. Memory allows the person to retain the information. On the other hand, researchers have called nostalgia an emotional state no memory. Memory does not allow to change the actual happening of past but in nostalgia the ideal condition for instance the conditions in which the person wanted the things to happen. Hirsh, a researcher said that in nostalgia persons imagine that time frame or try to choose the ideal conditions in which the event should have happened.
Taking this discrimination between memory and nostalgia, as a base of the project, we will reveal different concepts related to it. Though memories and nostalgia are two different kinds of feelings both have a great impact on the spiritual landmark of our minds. Memories are simply the recalling of past action, while nostalgia is something different from this. Nostalgia is not a new concept; people have been searching for it for many years, the only difference between then and now is in acceptance with its exact meaning. Nostalgia allows us to idealize things, it gives us the spirit to find who we want to be in the future. It serves many of the psychological functions and people around us have started accepting its importance. It has been declared as a highly social emotion. How this is sweet-bitter relationship is planned to be disused in this project.
Project Breakdown
All of the arguments related to past studies will be used to get help. Proper literature will be used to justify the basis of discrimination between memory and nostalgia. What has been done in history regarding these concepts and what misconceptions have been the part of literature regarding these two concepts will be also described in this project. The project will follow the pattern of the introduction of these concepts as well as the introduction of the topic. The other part will include the literature review of these concepts. Then based on the collected information conclusion of the project will be given.
Article#1
Allison, S. T., & Green, J. D. (2020). Nostalgia and Heroism: Theoretical Convergence of Memory, Motivation, and Function. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, p 1-13.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7786399/
This article aims to provide the relationship between the concept of nostalgia and Heroism science. In this article, the author has used four approaches to see how these two concepts have an interrelationship. Firstly, in this study, the definition of these two concepts is given. According to the author’s dictionary definition of nostalgia is defined as the past longing of sweet-bitter happening. Authors called these happenings sweet-bitter because researchers have shown that if the happening in the mind of a person is according to his/her wishes then these happening will be a source of sweet recalling and he will feel pleasure thinking of those happenings. But at the same time if the happening which the person has stored in his mind is not according to his/her desires these will be a source of unrest or bitterness of mind. Nostalgia, according to the author is an emotional state or the state of idealism in which the person wanted the thing to happen. Heroism, according to the author is the impressive action that leads the person to attain the desired goal. It refers to the conduct which is considered courageous. It had been clearly said in the article that on the information taken past studies, there had been showing no link between heroism and nostalgic activities. But as the nostalgic activities are perceived as the ideal or these approaches where a person wants to be in the perfect state, this characteristic has linked the nostalgic activities with heroism. Both nostalgic and heroisms are referred to as positive taken actions. The issue that this article has arisen is the change in the definition of the concept of nostalgia, all the definitions like a scientific, dictionary, and cross-cultural concepts of definitions are different from the concept of nostalgia.
The scientific definition says that nostalgia is a psychological disorder or a neurological disease. For many years, people with nostalgic attribute have been seen as a sign of negativity. They were considered depressed or anxious persons. Then at the turn of the millennium, it was said that these are not only negative attributes but also the positive sides were then these as not negative but the state in which a person wishes to be in the perfect ideal state. Then according to the cross-cultural concept nostalgia is the longing emotional state. Then in concludingly this article says that all of these characteristics are defined by different fields of definitions, says that heroism has all the properties which a nostalgic person wants to be in his thoughts and according to his desires. Finally at the end of the research, they said that there few aspects have arisen by the emergence of these two concepts, which can be explored further to benefit the new concepts like benefits that heroism can give to nostalgia and how nostalgic action can be improved. According to my perception of these concepts the author has tried to see the relationship between heroism and nostalgic actions which can be the evidence to argue that nostalgia, the state of perfectionism if fulfilled, enhances the heroic actions.
Article #2
Cheung, W. Y., Wildschut, T., & Sedikides, C. (2018). Autobiographical memory functions of nostalgia in comparison to rumination and counterfactual thinking: Similarity and uniqueness. Memory, 26(2), 229-237.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09658211.2017.1346129
In this article author compared nostalgia with memory functions. He specifically assessed the differences on individual bases regarding nostalgia and other memory functions. He took different memory functions as a base, which in return linked the study with a different aspect of individual autobiographical memory. The sequence of this article follows the definition of nostalgia and different aspects of memory including rumination autobiographical functions and counterfactual functions. These definitions said that ruminations are the behaviors and thoughts that grasp the attention of an individual towards the negative aspects of an event and cause to self-evaluate the mood and consequences of the event. Counterfactual thinking, on the other hand, is the thoughts that force an individual on thinking that how past events can have changed and how they have become the reason for good results. Getting better results will be called upward counterfactuals. In this aspect, it allows a person to compare and contrast the counterfactual thinking and rumination with nostalgia and use self-evaluation techniques. With the help of this person can think that how was the event and how it developed to occur in that condition. In the other part of the article, the author has talked about the measures of the variables.
The scales which he has used to measure the variables. Nostalgia is measured by the 7-item scale on which two extreme categories were written. Rumination was measured using the 10-item scale with two extremes of seldom to almost always. Counterfactual thinking was measured by 5 item scale with never too often poles. A self-administered questionnaire was d=filled by the respondents the respondents were workers of Amazon Turk, 281 respondents filled the questionnaire online. To increase their interest in the filling of the questionnaire they were offered $.50 again filling the questionnaire. After collecting the data different tests were applied to see the required results and to make them authenticated the reliability of data was made sure by the authors. Tests that run on the data were zero correlation, multiple regression, data analytical strategy canonical correlation was applied to the data. In the discussion, the author said that for the sake of examining the difference in individual differences nostalgia was compared to the self-reported functions. He also examined the uniqueness and the similarities among counterfactual thinking and ruminations. The focus was basically to see the relationship between the variables. At the end of going through this study, I concluded that there were not many strong pieces of evidence of the correlation between the required variables, self-reported memory functions. It also said that nostalgia had a more positive function than counterfactual thinking and rumination. He suggested that future research can be done on the positive functions of nostalgia that will help in nostalgia adaptiveness.