• Posted March 14, 2025

Nostalgic? It's Better For Friendships, Mental Health

Nostalgia might be met by eyerolls from some, as the emotion might inspire insipid images of rose-tinted glasses, gooey sentimentality and living in a time-lost past.

But people prone to nostalgia have an edge when it comes to their health and well-being, a new study says.

Nostalgic people have more close friends and put more effort into maintaining friendships and relationships than less sentimental sorts, researchers reported in the journal Cognition and Emotion.

Even teenagers can feel and benefit from nostalgia, researchers noted.

“People who feel nostalgic more often and value those memories are more aware of their important relationships and the need to nurture them,” lead researcher Kuan-Ju Huang, a doctoral student at Kyoto University in Japan, said in a news release.

“This means these friendships may be more likely to last, even as we get older and our lives, interests and responsibilities, change,” Huang continued.

Social networks play a critical role in a person’s well-being, providing psychological and cognitive benefits into old age, researchers said in background notes.

The reported results come from three experiments involving nearly 1,500 people in the U.S. and Europe, researchers said.

In the first, a group of nearly 450 undergraduate students at the University of Buffalo in New York were surveyed about their level of nostalgia and their networks of friends.

Those who said they were nostalgic put more importance on maintaining their friendships, and had the most very close friendships and relationships, results show.

The second experiment sought to find this nostalgia effect among a pool of nearly 400 U.S. adults.

Participants with an average age of 40 were surveyed and, once again, those who were nostalgic were found to put more work into maintaining friendships and had the most close friendships.

The third experiment used data from a long-running Dutch social science survey to examine the effect of nostalgia on social networks over a seven-year period.

Results showed people tend to become more nostalgic as they grow older.

What’s more, people who scored high or medium for nostalgia kept the same number of strong social ties between 2013 and 2019, particularly for people to whom they could talk about important matters.

By comparison, those with low levels of nostalgia had 18% fewer close relationships by the end of the seven years.

Altogether, the results indicate that a tendency to reminisce about happy times helps people realize the importance of relationships, and provides motivation to maintain them, researchers concluded.

“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.

The reasons are different for high levels of nostalgia in young and older adults, he added. 

“Life transitions during emerging adulthood, including leaving the family home and entering college or the workforce, may trigger a psychological need to find solace in nostalgia,” Huang said.

“Young adults may reminisce about their high school years or family moments when facing challenges during the transition to adulthood,” he continued. “For older adults, nostalgia is more likely to be associated with experiences about loss and feelings of a limited future.”

More information

The American Psychological Association (APA) has more on the importance of friendships to health.

SOURCE: Taylor & Francis Group, news release, March 13, 2025