When you imagine your favorite place from your past, what do you picture? Do you see blue sea and blue skies, 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, suggesting that the sea is a particularly good place for promoting the positive effects of thinking about the past.
“We wanted to understand what makes certain places more likely to evoke nostalgia,” said Elisabeta Militaru, a study author and a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, who worked on the study while at the University of Cambridge, in a press release. “What are the physical and psychological features that give a place its nostalgic pull?”
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Places from the Past
Nostalgia, or our tendency to think fondly of earlier times and experiences, is frequently tied to a particular place. In fact, that’s the basic idea behind “place nostalgia,” which is a sentimental longing for a location with positive personal associations. But which locations, exactly, are most likely to encourage these longings?
To find out, Militaru and her team surveyed around 1,000 participants from the U.S. and the U.K., all between 18 and 94 years of age. Prompted to think about their favorite places from their pasts, the participants were asked to identify the locales for which they felt the most nostalgia.
Their responses revealed that 20 and 26 percent of the nostalgic locations for U.S. and U.K. participants were seaside places, respectively, while 30 and 36 percent of them were “blue places,” or seas, lakes, and rivers. Meanwhile, “green places” only accounted for 10 percent of the nostalgic locales for the participants from both the U.S. and the U.K.
“We expected people to be more often nostalgic for green places since so many studies emphasise the psychological benefits of green, natural environments. We were surprised to find that blue places are the hallmark feature of place nostalgia,” Militaru said in the release. “Our findings add to the growing evidence that blue places are associated with increased psychological well-being.”
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A Location to Long For
According to Militaru, blue places may promote nostalgia through their particular physical and visual properties, including their brightness, their contrast, and their color saturation. In 2019, a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that these factors can change the feelings that are elicited by a particular place, suggesting that they could contribute to our seaside sentimentality.
Not only that, Militaru adds that the fractal property, or the overall balance between the complexity and the simplicity, of blue places could also play a part in our nostalgia.
“Past research suggests that landscapes with moderate fractal structure, like coastlines, tend to generate positive emotions,” Militaru said in the release. “People don’t like extremely chaotic outlines of the kind you might see in the middle of the forest, where you don’t get a sense of openness. People also don’t like too little complexity.”
Regardless of the reason behind our nostalgia for blue places, the results are important for all of us, who may benefit from feeling a bit more nostalgic for the past. Research indicates, for instance, that nostalgia provides a bevy of psychological benefits, increasing an individual’s sense of satisfaction, self-confidence, and social connection, all while staving off their feelings of isolation and loneliness.
“Nostalgia brings places into focus, much like a magnifying glass,” Militaru said in the release. “Meaningful places tend to be physically far away from us, yet nostalgia brings them back into focus and, in so doing, connects our past self to our present and future self.”
So, take a trip to the seaside. Thanks to its visual properties, you’re likely to think back on it fondly.
Article Sources
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Sam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
