Patterns of brain activity associated with nostalgia: a social-cognitive neuroscience perspective

Nostalgia arises from tender and yearnful reflection on meaningful life events or important persons from one’s past. In the last two decades, the literature has documented a variety of ways in which nostalgia benefits psychological well-being. Only a handful of studies, however, have addressed the neural basis of the emotion. In this prospective review, we postulate a neural model of nostalgia. Self-reflection, autobiographical memory, regulatory capacity and reward are core components of the emotion. Thus, nostalgia involves brain activities implicated in self-reflection processing (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus), autobiographical memory processing (hippocampus, medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus), emotion regulation processing (anterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex) and reward processing (striatum, substantia nigra, ventral tegmental area and ventromedial prefrontal cortex). Nostalgia’s potential to modulate activity in these core neural substrates has both theoretical and applied implications.