Feeling Nostalgic for a Particular Place? You’re Probably Longing for the Sea

When you imagine your favorite place in your past, what do you think? Do you see a blue and blue sky, or do you see the green of grass and trees?

A new study in Current research in ecological and social psychology Shows that people tend to feel more nostalgia for the seaside than for fields, forests and mountains, which suggests that the sea is a particularly good place to promote the positive effects of reflection on the past.

“We wanted to understand what makes certain places more likely to evoke nostalgia,” said Elisabeta Militaru, study author and psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, who worked on the study at the University of Cambridge, in a press release. “What are the physical and psychological characteristics that give its nostalgic traction a place?”

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Places of the past

Nostalgia, or our tendency to affectionately think of previous times and experiences, is often linked to a particular place. In fact, it is the basic idea behind the “nostalgia for the place”, which is a sentimental desire for a location with positive personal associations. But what places, exactly, are the most likely to encourage these desires?

To find out, Militaru and his team interviewed around 1,000 participants from the United States and the United Kingdom, all aged 18 to 94. Invited to think about their favorite places in their past, participants were invited to identify the places for which they felt the most nostalgia.

Their responses revealed that 20 and 26% of nostalgic locations for participants in the United States and the United Kingdom were seasle respectively, while 30 and 36% of them were “blue places” or seas, lakes and rivers. Meanwhile, “Green Places” represented only 10% of nostalgic places for participants in the United States and the United Kingdom

“We expected people to be more often nostalgic for green places, because so many studies focus on the psychological advantages of green and natural environments. We were surprised to note that blue places are the characteristic characteristic of the nostalgia for the place,” said militaru in the press release. “Our results add to the growing evidence that blue places are associated with increased psychological well-being.”

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A location to desire

According to Militaru, blue places can promote nostalgia through their particular physical and visual properties, including their brightness, contrast and color saturation. In 2019, a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology have found that these factors can change the feelings which are caused by a particular place, suggesting that they could contribute to our sentimentality by the sea.

Not only does Militaru add that fractal property, or the overall balance between complexity and simplicity, blue places could also play a role in our nostalgia.

“Previous research suggests that landscapes with a moderate fractal structure, such as the ribs, tends to generate positive emotions,” Militaru said in the press release. “People do not like extremely chaotic contours of the genre you might see in the middle of the forest, where you don’t have a feeling of openness. People don’t like too little complexity.”

Whatever the reason for our nostalgia for blue places, the results are important for all of us, which can benefit from a little more nostalgic for the past. Research Indicates, for example, that nostalgia offers a multitude of psychological advantages, increasing the feeling of satisfaction, self -confidence of an individual and social connection, while avoiding his feelings of isolation and loneliness.

“Nostalgia sets up places, a bit like a magnifying glass,” said militaru in the press release. “Significant places tend to be physically far from us, but nostalgia brings them back to orientation and, in doing so, connects our Self -Ego to our current and future self.”

So make a trip by the sea. Thanks to its visual properties, you probably think about it with tenderness.

Sources of articles

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Sam Walters is a journalist covering archeology, paleontology, ecology and the evolution of Discover, as well as an assortment of other subjects. Before joining the Discover team as a deputy editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at the Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.