题目：Mental Time Travelling: How Nostalgia Shapes Meaningful Existence

报告人：姜佟琳 研究员，北京大学

时间：2025年12月2日上午10点

地点：心理学部213

报告人简介：姜佟琳，北京大学心理与认知科学学院研究员，博士生导师。Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin副主编，Journal of Personality and Social Psychology编委。国际自我与认同研究学会主席委员，中国心理学会人格心理学专业委员会委员，北京心理学会、北京社会心理学会理事，西藏自治区心理学会特聘专家。美国心理学科学协会2023年度“学术新星”。研究工作致力于考察自我探索与意义建构的心理机制，关注生命意义、自我认同发展、情感体验和消费行为，采用实验、大数据和跨学科方法探索人类如何在变化世界中寻求幸福与成长。文章发表在 Nature Mental Health, Nature Reviews Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Social Psychological and Personality Science, Emotion等期刊上。主持国家自然科学基金面上项目、青年项目、合作交流项目等多项科研项目。

报告摘要：Nostalgia is more than sentimental reminiscence—it represents a profound form of mental time travel that enables individuals to curate, reconstruct, and derive significance from past experiences, thereby continuously constructing and nourishing a meaningful existence. In this talk, I will demonstrate how nostalgia activates a memory-management motive, an intrinsic drive to curate autobiographical memory assets for their long-term utility. This motive leads individuals to prioritize “collectible” experiences deemed worth remembering, even those involving personal cost, solitude, or uncertainty. It also extends to material choices, increasing willingness to acquire products symbolically tied to such meaningful moments. Notably, nostalgia’s influence transcends personally lived pasts. It enhances appreciation for authenticity, valuing objects and experiences perceived as timeless, essence-rich, and worthy of preservation across historical, value-based, and categorical dimensions. Our research identifies essence-orientation as the underlying mechanism driving this preference, which often persists despite trade-offs in utilitarian quality, though it diminishes under conditions of temporal disruption, time pressure, or strongly instrumental decision contexts. Collectively, this research reframes nostalgia as an active, future-oriented formative force that motivates individuals to invest in experiences and goods contributing to a lasting sense of meaning, transforming how we understand the psychological architecture of a well-lived life.