Nostalgia and Envisioning Reduce Pain Ratings in Healthy Adults and Individuals With Chronic Pain

Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience that can undermine health and functioning. Nostalgia-a complex, bittersweet emotion linked to episodic memory-has been associated with reduced acute and chronic pain. In contrast, future-oriented affective states such as envisioning have received comparatively little attention in pain research. We examined whether brief nostalgia and envisioning inductions reduce acute and chronic pain ratings.

Two experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 used a 3 (Group: envisioning, nostalgia, control) × 2 (Pain intensity: low, high) × 2 (Time: pre-test, post-test) mixed design to assess experimentally induced acute pain elicited by electrical stimulation in 120 university students. Experiment 2 used a 3 (Group: envisioning, nostalgia, control) × 2 (Time: pre-test, post-test) mixed design to assess self-reported chronic pain intensity in 179 individuals living with chronic pain.

In Experiment 1, nostalgia and envisioning yielded significantly greater reductions in acute pain ratings than the control condition across low- and high-intensity stimulation. In Experiment 2, nostalgia and envisioning were associated with significantly larger reductions in chronic pain ratings than the control condition.

Brief nostalgia and envisioning inductions were associated with lower self-reported pain ratings in both an acute experimental paradigm and a chronic pain sample.

This study examined whether brief, writing-based inductions of past-oriented nostalgia and future-oriented envisioning are associated with lower pain ratings. Across two experiments, both inductions were associated with reduced self-reported pain ratings in an acute electrical-stimulation paradigm and in a sample of individuals living with chronic pain. The findings extend previous work on nostalgia and pain and provide preliminary evidence that emotionally immersive future simulation may also be relevant to pain perception. These results may inform future mechanistic and intervention-oriented research, although their clinical utility requires further investigation.