Effects of Nostalgia on Responses to Negative Feedback

Nostalgia is a bittersweet emotion evoked by memories of cherished personal experiences. Though nostalgia is a self-focused emotion, it has many interpersonal effects as well. Feeling nostalgia increases feelings of social connectedness and self esteem, and may protect against negative effects of existential threat (Wildschut et al., 2006). However, less is known about the extent to which nostalgia relates to anger and aggression. We hypothesized that nostalgia would buffer against the effect of negative feedback on feelings of anger and motivation to aggress. Undergraduate students wrote about a nostalgic or objective memory, and then received negative feedback about another personal writing project. Participants reported their feelings of anger, then had the opportunity to punish the individual who gave them negative feedback by administering loud noise blasts in a competitive game. We discuss the results and real-world implications of these findings.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/uresposters/1283/thumbnail.jp

Yugonostalgia: The Pain of the Present

This project concerns the concept of nostalgia in the context of Yugoslavia. Through my interviews, observations, and daily interactions, I have sought to present the state of Yugonostalgia in present-day Belgrade. This project looks at Yugonostalgia through three lenses: the past, present, and future. In general, there is positive thinking about the past, a dismal perception of the present, and an optimistic outlook for the future. Despite the fact that many people have these nostalgic stories about the past, Yugonostalgia is still a negative and sometimes offensive term. In this paper, I, the researcher, struggle with my own nostalgia for what I believe would have been a utopian society and with being open and perceptive to other, differing types of nostalgia present in my interviewees

The Nostalgic Revival in America

This paper is primarily concerned with the revival of nostalgia in America as seen by the minimal artist. The project reviews the current nostalgic trends in the media of theater, films, television, and radio, fashion, entertainment, business, and the arts. Attention is paid to the techniques by which this nostalgia is presented through the media of drawing and printmaking. Because the artist\u27s prints and drawings best illustrate the intentions of the artist, the majority of the paper is devoted to the study of them

Mending What’s Invisible

A written thesis to accompany the M.F.A. Exhibition Mending What’s Invisible, in which the artist’s personal experiences and memories explore the cultural identities and femininity in Korea and the US. These identities are explored by using traditional Korean motifs, embroidery patterns, and the visual images of the artist\u27s childhood photographs in the projects of “Reconnecting of Nostalgia” and “Mutating”. Also the visual clips of the artist\u27s hometown is demonstrated in the video project “Things I hated” that discusses criticalities of Korean cultures and a sense of nostalgia for childhood in Korea. The project comes out of a personal need to connect the artists\u27 different identities but also wants to create an awareness of the conflict between different cultural understandings of Korea and the US

The breakfast series

The purpose of this project was to produce visual work that examined a possible nostalgia that unfolds around the breakfast meal. The method of examination involved creating a process breakfast that was followed thirty times. The result of following this process was the taking of three hundred Polaroids that were then edited for their potential to visually reconstruct the ideal process breakfast. This process of discovery has resulted in a number of significant insight into the narrative of breakfast: that an idealized narrative could exist in the visualization of the process breakfast; that elements of nostalgia that may exist within the work are contingent on the viewer; and the level of authenticity of the project affects the nature of the idealization in effect

Nostalgic Frontiers: Violence Across the Midwest in Popular Film

In Nostalgic Frontiers: Violence Across the Midwest in Popular Film, I analyze the temporality and politics of nostalgia while providing a critical history of Midwestern representations in popular culture from the turn of the twentieth century through the first decade of the new millennium. A general line of inquiry informs this project: how do narratives set in the Midwest imagine, reify, and reproduce Midwestern identity, and what are the repercussions of such regional imagery circulating in American culture? Throughout this project, I identify shifting cultural perceptions of the Midwest at particular historical moments. In relation to these regional considerations, I analyze two modes of nostalgia: as a spatial element that is mapped onto the Midwest\u27s landscape and as a cultural force that regulates Midwesterners with violence. I developed the concept of nostalgic violence in order to theorize violent attempts to reshape the present in relation to idealized images of the past in Midwestern narratives. Overall, with Nostalgic Frontiers, I work to more fully integrate nostalgia and regional study into the diverse field of media studies by assessing how ideological and historical factors are filtered through cinema, thus shaping our understanding of the Midwest

Media Post-coloniality and the Ethereal Persian ‘Empress’: How Hollywood Weaponized the Nostalgia of Exile

The osmosis between Iranian exile, Oriental repertoires, and the commodification of nostalgia in film and contemporary1 culture alludes to the Disney reproduction of the East that is capitalized by Hollywood’s invisible hand. The commodification of Orientalist logic via nostalgia of old civilization and Achaemenid grandeur is conveyed by Hamid Naficy’s (1991) reference to Edward Said’s (1978) ‘imaginary2 geography’—the inventive tool of narration that augments tales and anecdotes of exilic narratives, while heightening essentialism of the East. The European modeling of coronation, bejeweled scepters of royalty under the Pahlavi period (1941-1979), and cinematic repertoires of Iranians in film are perpetuated for viewers via fetishization, lust, and enchantment. The televised 1967 coronation of Queen Farah (b. 1938) solidified the trope of the Persian ‘Empress’ through picturesque markers of Achaemenid rulership (550-330 BCE). Media3 propagations of nostalgia in the paradisiacal Pahlavi coronation can be paralleled to current illusions of the Orient presented in the film Paterson (Jarmusch, 2016), starring exiled Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani. I refer to the Pahlavi coronation to expand on the spectacle of ‘nostalgia’, and the desire for a distant homeland. Naficy’s (1991) interpretation of ‘nostalgia’—a factor of exile, expounds how relics and objects induce a longing for the distant and ahistorical. Objects of nostalgia are inexplicably weaponized in Hollywood inventions of Near Eastern characters and serve as palpable symbols of the East via skewed representations of women, sexuality, and the exotic4 (Ahmed, 2006). Poetry, nostalgia, and fictional tales of the Orient in Paterson (Jarmusch, 2016) allude to Said’s (1978) vision of the imperialist project in Orientalism. The inventive and imaginary power of color media in the televised Pahlavi coronation and the fashioning of a politically permanent subject of interest—Iranians and the East, augured a pertinent era of media post-coloniality5 via the preservation of orientalism, rather than the Orient.

Marston: Remembering Home Through Creative Practice

This practice-led research project investigates the potential for creative practice to recall and reimagine a lost home. Identifying with memory and material culture studies, the project tests how habitual body memories enable narratives of home to be imbued in artworks generated out-of-place. Taking into account the implications of nostalgia, and through a personal project, I seek to comprehend the broader effects of memory of home and place

Remembering Negdels: Nostalgia, Memory & Soviet-Era Herding Collectives

During the socialist period Mongolia’s nomadic herders were grouped into collective herding units called negdels. Today, over twenty years after Mongolia transitioned to democracy, herding has been privatized completely and negdels are a distant memory. This study explores the history of negdels by conducting twenty-five oral interviews with herders about their memories of collective herding. This study focuses on a soum in the Mongolian countryside, Bayandelger, while also incorporating interviews with people from Ulaanbaatar. Bayandelger is a unique location for this project because it was selected by the Soviets to receive assistance in an effort to make it a model of a successful negdel. The study’s findings show that many of the participants, particularly those who were part of the Bayandelger negdel, remember the socialist time fondly and express significant nostalgia for their days in the negdel. Building on work about postsocialist nostalgia in other countries, broader conclusions can be drawn about the nostalgia expressed by participants in this study. Nostalgia is a remembrance of the past but it is also a reflection on the present, so interviewees’ memories are examined as a commentary on their attitudes towards Mongolia’s current economic and political situation

Urban Development and Fishing Livelihoods in the Museum: Nostalgia and Discontent in Central Vietnam

This article explores how the topics of fishing and urban development are addressed in a Vietnamese social history museum. Drawing on a project taking place in the Museum of Danang, it describes the way the museum represented the voices of a displaced fishing community who were moved from traditional fishing huts on the riverside to a social housing complex as part of Danang’s urban development plan in the 2000s. Capturing the impact of the community’s relocation on their fishing livelihoods through an exhibition of objects, photographs and texts, the article reveals ways in which nostalgia is recruited to make social, political and moral commentary on urban equality and livelihood change in a rapidly developing city. Methodologically, the project explored the limits of critical representation in an authoritarian state and how nostalgia can be understood as a subtle call for ethical action