Longing for the Past and Music Listening Preferences

Music is one of the strongest means for evoking feelings of nostalgia. This chapter gives an overview of the changing meaning of nostalgia over time, discussing the psychological functions of nostalgia and music’s role in achieving this. The positive and negative impact of nostalgia are discussed, with consideration of how music preferences are influenced by the degree to which one misses things from the past. The findings presented in this chapter underpin one of the central premises of the volume, which is that the interaction between music, emotion and memory explain much of our music preferences and music listening selections.