I gotcompletely turned around and ended years and years of "sad and blue Christamases" and found,too, if I keep rehashing and bringingup old memories od sadness and disappointments: A Methodist Miniser in a Church I sometimes attended,right across thestree fromme in Westfield. Nj, held a special "Blue Christmas Service" for allof us sad peopel whowantedtoattend , at Christmas time!1 and He geve me a piece of information-reason for rehashing and being sad every Christmas- I was about 75 yrs of age thatyear- We have a hidden agenda that somehow it's all goingto change and be better!" Wow! Kicked the props out fromunder me as I knew inall my reasoning that he changeof the past was impossible! So STOP Revisiting IT! Clyde D Beaty SSGTUSMCRET DURHAM<NC
Those Were the Days
Nostalgia is more than a sentimental mood, it may be the way we cope with feelings of loneliness and isolation.
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I confess to taking guilty pleasure in the paintings of Norman Rockwell. A few years ago, a friend dragged me to a major retrospective on the artist's work, and I got hooked on the images of kids doing homework and families gathering for holiday dinners and communities turning out for local sporting events. I know some find this vision too cloying for our postmodern sensibilities, but for me the images stir up memories of a simpler past. Something inside me responds to the human connection in Rockwell's idealized world.
That's called nostalgia, and it turns out it's not an entirely bad thing. In fact, my response to these treacly images may be deep-wired into my neurons, and for good reason. A growing number of psychologists have become interested in this uniquely human emotion, in particular its connection to loneliness and social isolation and emotional resilience. Indeed, some believe that nostalgia may be a powerful psychological tool for fostering mental health, a coping strategy we use to protect ourselves against the existential fear of being alone.
People who are chronically lonely perceive themselves as disconnected from others, especially family and friends; they feel isolated from all the traditional sources of social support. Are lonely people more likely to be nostalgic than others? Is it possible that nostalgia—that sentimental longing for the past—might have a tonic effect on loneliness, buffering against these feelings of isolation?
That is the idea that psychologist Xinyue Zhou of Sun Yat-Sen University in China decided to explore in the laboratory. Zhou and colleagues ran a series of experiments to explore the value of nostalgia in counteracting the emotional costs of loneliness, for people from many walks of life. They wanted to see if nostalgic reverie could create symbolic connections with others—connections powerful enough to temper the very real pangs of isolation.
Here's an example. The psychologists recruited hundreds of migrant children who had moved from remote rural areas to a major city just a few years earlier. These kids were about 11 years old on average, so we can all imagine how emotionally disruptive such an experience must have been and how alien their new world must have seemed. They gave the kids a battery of psychological tests to measure just how lonely they were after a few years in the city, how nostalgic they were for the past and how supportive they saw the people in their world.
The results were paradoxical. The loneliest kids did indeed see the world as unfriendly and unsupportive. But many of the loneliest kids were also among the most nostalgic, and this nostalgia appears to have a buffering effect. That is, loneliness seems to churn up nostalgic memories, which in turn salve the pain of loneliness. Nostalgia is self-protective.
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