Nostalgia and Facial Emotion Recognition

Nostalgia and Facial Emotion Recognition - Tim Wildschut, Irem Ozdemir, Erich Graf, Constantine Sedikides (University of Southhampton)

Nostalgia is a sentimental longing for one's past. We examined the hypothesis (rooted in attachment theory and prior research) that nostalgia prone individuals, by virtue of their greater empathy, evince better emotion recognition. Participants first completed measures of nostalgia proneness and empathy, and then performed an emotional face categorisation task. In this task, participants compared two facial expressions with different morph levels (e.g., 65% intensity vs. 35% intensity) and then indicated which of the two expressions most clearly indicated the given emotion (e.g., which face is most sad?). Results were supportive. High-nostalgia (compared to low-nostalgia) individuals were more sensitive to small changes in the intensity of targets' emotional expressions. This association between nostalgia and superior emotion recognition was mediated by empathy.