Locating nostalgia among the emotions: A bridge from loss to love

An effective way of identifying the psychological role of an emotion is by probing its position relative to other emotions, such as in terms of appraisals, occurrence, lay conceptualization, and consequences. A set of recent studies offer such comparisons for nostalgia against a backdrop of many other emotions. These studies depict nostalgia as an approach-oriented emotion that resembles positive emotions more closely than negative ones, and place nostalgia especially close to positive social emotions. A complementary new analysis of the correlations between nostalgia and 31 other emotions furthermore locates nostalgia between experiences related to loss and love. Altogether, recent work on nostalgia among the emotions portrays it as a psychological bridge from loss toward love.