Ziyan Yang

Nostalgia arises from tender and yearnful reflection on meaningful life events or important persons from one’s past. In the last two decades, the literature has documented a variety of ways in which nostalgia benefits psychological well-being. Only a handful of studies, however, have addressed the neural basis of the emotion. In this prospective review, we postulate a neural model of nostalgia. Self-reflection, autobiographical memory, regulatory capacity and reward are core components of the emotion. Thus, nostalgia involves brain activities implicated in self-reflection processing (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus), autobiographical memory processing (hippocampus, medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus), emotion regulation processing (anterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex) and reward processing (striatum, substantia nigra, ventral tegmental area and ventromedial prefrontal cortex). Nostalgia’s potential to modulate activity in these core neural substrates has both theoretical and applied implications.

Has China’s vigorous economic growth raised its citizens’ happiness? Existing studies have portrayed, if not a pessimistic picture, a complicated one. We conducted two studies to clarify this issue. In Study 1, we used data from available national surveys between 1990 and 2018 (64 samples) and demonstrated a significant quadratic U-shaped trend and a rising tendency. In Study 2, we conducted a cross-temporal meta-analysis from 2001 to 2019 (689 samples) and found that Chinese happiness manifested a linear rising trend, although this trend was more salient in the community sample than in the student one. In both studies, Granger causal analysis suggested that economic growth was the Granger cause of the increase in Chinese happiness. These findings indicate that economic growth has raised happiness in China since 1990, particularly since 2001, and highlight the importance of moving beyond the Easterlin Paradox.

The present research investigated whether the outbreak of COVID-19 would increase Chinese participants’ tendency of seeing meaning in negative experiences (MINE). A longitudinal study (Study 1, N = 2535) showed that Chinese college students reported higher tendency of MINE during the outbreak of COVID-19 than three months before the outbreak. A cross-sectional study (Study 2) investigated a large student sample (N = 16096) and a large non-student sample (N = 11446) during the outbreak of COVID-19 in China and consistently showed that participants who were encountering high disease threat reported stronger perceived threat as well as greater tendency of MINE than those who were encountering low disease theat. Furthermore, the heightened perception of threat accounted for the heightened tendency of MINE. These results suggest that the COVID-19 outbreak makes Chinese more likely to see meaning in negative experiences, which may provide benefits for coping.

We hypothesised that sense of home serves as a buffer against self‐threat. In three experiments, we induced sense of home (vs. control) and assessed its buffering function to threat. Sense of home augmented openness to stereotype threat information (Experiment 1), increased performance on a spatial rotation ability test after stereotype threat (Experiment 2), and reduced the desire for high‐status products following mortality salience (Experiment 3). This “proof of concept” research establishes the buffering potential of sense of home and raises theoretical and practical implications.