A recent study found that YouTube comments on music videos from more recent decades are more likely to convey feelings of nostalgia compared to comments on videos from earlier decades. Contrary to the belief that nostalgia primarily revolves around the distant past, the results suggest that individuals are experiencing nostalgia for time periods that are relatively recent. The new findings appear in Applied Cognitive Psychology.
Nostalgia is a universal human experience that involves revisiting positive memories from the past. It often brings about positive emotions and a sense of connection to one’s personal history. Research suggests that engaging in nostalgia can improve mood, increase motivation, and foster a sense of social connectedness.
By analyzing comments on YouTube videos featuring music from different decades, the researchers sought to better understand whether people show a preference for content from more distant pasts or if recent periods are equally nostalgic.
This research is significant because it takes a naturalistic approach to studying nostalgia in the context of real-world online interactions. This approach contrasts with traditional laboratory studies and surveys, which may not capture the authentic ways people experience and express nostalgia in their day-to-day lives.
“Nostalgia has traditionally been thought of as something people engage in as they get older,” said study author Charles Areni, a retired former executive dean and professor in the Faculty of Business and Law at the University of Wollongong in Australia. “Early research from the 1960s suggested that 60+ year old people perform ‘life reviews’ to assess their lives for meaning, purpose, value, etc. Older people want to believe that they have ‘lived a good life,’ so nostalgia often involves embellishing the lived past; remembering it as better than it actually was at the time.”
“The target period for waxing nostalgic about the past seems to be the ages 15–30, called the ‘reminiscence bump.’ No matter how old a person is now, they will tend to reflect back on that period of their life. So, this suggested that 60+ year olds performing life reviews (and there are plenty of 60+ users on YouTube), would access archival content from decades past, with the 1960s through the 1980s being the target decades.”
“However, more recent research has linked nostalgia to multiple psychological benefits (e.g., mood, self-esteem, social connectedness, etc) that would presumably apply to multiple age groups,” Areni explained. “Another program of research has examined how the internet and social media have made users more prone to revisiting the recent past. Indeed, Facebook, Google, and other social media have algorithms that force the recent past onto users (i.e., ‘Your memories from 9 years ago’ with a photo the user posted on that day). This suggested that nostalgia would be more prevalent for video content from the social media decades – 2000s and 2010s.”
“So, by scraping YouTube comments directed at archival content from specifically identified years from 1950–2019, we could assess naturally competing hypotheses in an applied, ecologically valid context.”
For their study, the researchers focused on 56 YouTube videos titled “Top Songs of (year)” spanning the decades from the 1950s to the 2010s. They collected a total of 37,217 comments from these videos on March 25, 2020 and used an automated text analysis tool to identify positive sentiments toward a specific historical period, statements suggesting a longing for the past, and direct references to nostalgia.
“The method for identifying comments referring to nostalgia was interesting,” Areni said. “An automated text analysis software called Leximancer identified frequently co-occurring words in user comments (e.g., miss, days, times, kid, school), and we used Boolean operators to simulate syntax such that the words could be assembled into sentences conveying nostalgia (e.g., miss and ((days or times) and (kid or school)) = ‘I miss those days. I was just a kid.’).”
The study found that comments on music videos from the two most recent decades (2000s–2010s) were more likely to express a sense of nostalgia compared to comments from the earlier decades (1950s–1980s). In other words, users who engaged with videos from the more recent past were more likely to feel and express nostalgia in their comments.
“We thought that the social media effect would certainly be apparent in terms of nostalgia for the recent past; and that’s what we found,” Areni told PsyPost. “We were a little surprised at the lack of nostalgia in comments on archival content from the 1960s and 1970s. For those decades the dominant emotion was gratitude – users expressing how thankful or lucky they were to be alive at that time. But that’s another finding for perhaps another article.”
The findings suggest that social media platforms, particularly YouTube, serve as a means for users of various age groups to engage in nostalgic reflection. The prevalence of nostalgic sentiments in comments on music videos indicates that people are using these platforms to revisit and share memories from the past, and that this engagement with nostalgia transcends generational boundaries.
“Social media seems to be changing the way we think about the past, include our own previously lived experiences,” Areni said. “We are now in a better position than ever before to hold accurate, complete ‘life stories,’ a basic human motivation identified in much previous research. However, spending more time and effort organizing and revisiting the past comes at a cost – less time and attention for the present.
“There are practical, everyday examples of this trade-off happening right before our eyes. I attended a quarter-final match at the U.S. Open (tennis) recently, and looking down on the crowd from my not-so-great, high up in the stadium, I noticed that everybody was on their phone and/or taking selfies. Thousands of so-called ‘spectators’ were too busy creating memories of their experience at the U.S. Open to actually watch the match.”
While the study’s naturalistic design offers several advantages in capturing real-world behavior, it also introduces certain limitations.
“We ultimately don’t know how old the users who left comments were,” Areni told PsyPost. “This would be an obvious direction for future research. It would be relatively straightforward to develop a custom made website featuring archival material from multiple decades, and to recruit participants to interact with the website at their own leisure over an extended period of time. This would not only allow demographic information about users to be linked to the content of their comments, but also for subsequent questionnaires to assess the motivations for visiting certain years and leaving comments.”
The study, “How long ago were the “good old days”? Comparing the prevalence of nostalgia in YouTube comments on music videos from recent versus distant decades“, was authored by Charles S. Areni and Mathew Todres.
