Same emotion, different stimuli: A context-sensitive method to evoke nostalgia

Lived experience and current context are critical antecedents of emotions. However, practical methodologies for incorporating these factors into experimental emotion research remain scarce. We developed and tested an idiographic-nomothetic method to evoke a prototypically situated emotion: nostalgia. We describe the iterative qualitative and quantitative method, which involved (1) choosing cross-cultural target populations to manipulate present versus developmental context, (2) creating a conceptually and visually standardized food image set, (3) testing the nomothetic and idiographic factors in nostalgia, (4) measuring the outcomes' replicability, and (5) testing the relation of state to global trait nostalgia. The method was examined on US university students who share the same current environment but originate from two distinct developmental contexts (USA vs. India). Across the two cohorts, nostalgic value exhibited an idiographically nomothetic pattern: vast variances between individuals coexisted alongside a cross-cultural pattern of high nostalgia for developmentally consistent foods within a person, which was greater for the culture further displaced from home. Nostalgia for food was consistent across time; high test-retest reliability was on par with food familiarity. Global trait nostalgia contributed to the propensity and intensity of evoked state nostalgia. We discuss this method's usefulness for bridging phenomenological and positivist accounts of emotions while providing a practical way to systematically probe the impact of lived experience and context on their expression.