Nostalgia is a frequently experienced complex emotion, understood by laypersons in the United Kingdom and United States of America to (a) refer prototypically to fond, self-relevant, social memories and (b) be more pleasant (e.g., happy, warm) than unpleasant (e.g., sad, regretful). This research examined whether people across cultures conceive of nostalgia in the same way. Students in 18 countries across 5 continents (N = 1,704) rated the prototypicality of 35 features of nostalgia. The samples showed high levels of agreement on the rank-order of features. In all countries, participants rated previously identified central (vs. peripheral) features as more prototypical of nostalgia, and showed greater interindividual agreement regarding central (vs. peripheral) features. Cluster analyses revealed subtle variation among groups of countries with respect to the strength of these pancultural patterns. All except African countries manifested the same factor structure of nostalgia features. Additional exemplars generated by participants in an open-ended format did not entail elaboration of the existing set of 35 features. Findings identified key points of cross-cultural agreement regarding conceptions of nostalgia, supporting the notion that nostalgia is a pancultural emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 40. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 30 September 2026.
All research outputs
#1,305,101
of 34,437,553 outputs
Outputs from Emotion
#320
of 2,428 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#11,954
of 373,501 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Emotion
#11
of 84 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,437,553 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 96th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 2,428 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 27.1. This one has done well, scoring higher than 86% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 84 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 86% of its contemporaries.
