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Nostalgia can cure writer's block- 2-Mar-2015
Writer's block is a condition, associated with writing, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work or experiences a creative slowdown.
Psychologists at the University of Southampton split 175 Irish undergraduates into two groups.
One set was asked to remember "an ordinary event in your life" and think about how it made them feel, while the other was tasked with "immersing [themselves] in a nostalgic experience".
They were then told to write either a story involving a cat, a princess and a race car, or a tale beginning with the line: "One cold winter evening, a man and a woman were alarmed by a sound coming from a nearby house."
When both sets of stories were judged for their creativity on standard criteria, the nostalgia-primed writers did substantially better than their peers, 'The Times' reported.
Psychologists believe nostalgia can enlarge the mind and make it more sensitive to new concepts.
The researchers link nostalgia to some of the pivotal works of western literature, from Homer's 'The Odyssey' to Dostoevsky's novel 'Notes from Underground'.
"The cultural association of nostalgia with the aforementioned creative works may suggest that nostalgia is a conservative, traditionalist sentiment," researchers wrote in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
"Such an impression, however, would be largely unwarranted. Nostalgia harnesses the past for engaging with the present and future," they said.
The psychologists also speculated that novelists, film-makers and artists who choose to delve back into the past may be able to summon greater powers of imagination.
