The Study Of The Relationship Between Nostalgia And The Subjective Well-being Of University Students

Nostalgia in the modern sense is no longer limited to the negative emotions of homesickness, but to the prevalence of personal emotional experiences. Due to the rapid development of society and the changing times, the nostalgia of young people as... represented by college student population has become increasingly apparent.In a rapidly developing society and a time of changes, issues on the nostalgia of young people represented by the college students appeared. In recent years, Western psychologists’researches showed that the nostalgia play a positive role in people’s life, and the nostalgia is likely to be a mixed emotional experience under the guidance of the positive emotion. Nostalgia can enhance the sense of social connection, it can also reduce the sense of isolation, repair or meet the sense of belonging, enhance the level of happiness. In order to verify the positive influences of nostalgia, this article intends to explore relationship between the nostalgia of college students and the SWB in the special cultural background of China. Using the questionnaire method this article selected the nostalgic tendency scale of localization (Lu Manman 2008) and the revised subjective well-being scale (Duan Jianhua,1996) as a research tool. About 400 undergraduate and graduate students in Southwest University were surveyed, and as a result 380 valid questionnaires were returned.Conclusions of this study are as the followings:(1) In overall, the nostalgic tendency of Chinese students ranking from high to low are: the family nostalgic tendencies, personal nostalgic tendencies, as well as the personal and social nostalgic tendencies.(2) There are no significant differences between sexes as to nostalgia. However, the various scores of Nostalgia for female students are higher than those of the male students. Especially in personal nostalgia tendency, female students have significantly higher scores than male students.(3) There are significant nostalgia differences between students from rural areas and students from urban areas. As to the overall nostalgic tendency, personal nostalgic tendency and family nostalgic tendency, students from rural areas have significantly higher marks than students from the urban areas.(4) Though there are not so much grade differences in nostalgia of college students, there are significant grade differences in personal nostalgia, where freshmen’s personal nostalgic tendency was significantly higher than the sophomore’s and the first-year graduate students’. The senior undergraduate student’s personal nostalgic tendency is significantly higher than that of the first year graduate students. In other words, personal nostalgic tendency is more obvious in the first year of college, then declines when it turns into sophomore and junior year. But the tendency will rise again in the senior year; after entering the graduate school, it will decline again and then level off.(5) Between the college students from one-child-family and those from non one-child-family, there is no significant difference in the overall nostalgic tendencies. Anyway the average nostalgic scores of the students from one-child-family were higher than those of other students; especially for family nostalgic, students from one-child-family showed obviously higher tendency.(6) While there were no significant correlations found between the students overall nostalgic tendencies, personal nostalgic tendencies and their subjective well-being, the correlations between social nostalgic tendencies and SWB were significantly negative, and the correlations between family nostalgic tendencies and subjective well-being sense were significantly positive.In summary, this article argues that nostalgia is a mixed emotional experience. Because personal and family related nostalgia are recalled from their past positive experience, they can be used to repair and compensate problems from reality. Therefore personal and family nostalgia can put positive influences on SWB, which is verified by the Western scholars. At same time, we can see that the western conclusion is derived in the context of individualism. While in a Chinese society where people are under the guidance of collectivism culture, nostalgia may arise from an individual’s integration into society or integration into collectivism, which are featured by the time and the characteristics of their groups. Chinese college students experienced great social changes in the opening up of China, so the negative relationship between their social nostalgia and their subjective well-being is reasonable. Therefore to a certain extent, it is believed the negative correlations of social nostalgia tendency and SWB just offset the positive correlations of personal, family nostalgia and SWB, thus overshadowing the overall nostalgia and SWB correlations. In essence, the conclusion of our study does not contradict the conclusion from the west.