Yugo-nostalgia

Cecelia Ky-Lan Do
May 5
11 min read

by Andrea Mojsoska

art by Anjali Jawa

Baton in one hand, flowers in the other. A relay race that spanned three thousand kilometers and thousands of runners. Music, sports, community. This is how Yugoslavia’s youth celebrated and commemorated President Josip Broz Tito’s birthday at the annual Relay of Youth, on May 25, for forty-three years.

Decades after the fall of Yugoslavia, framed pictures of Tito still loom over the homes of its former residents. Many cherish their memories of him and of the fallen country, romanticizing a past marked by both unity and dictatorship, a feeling often labeled “Yugo-nostalgia”—a term coined by journalist Slaven Letica in the Croatian weekly Globus magazine in 1992 [1]. Yet, reality paints a version of Yugoslavia that deviates from this romanticized counterpart. Through the upbeat rhythm of ex-Yugoslav rock and the rich taste of coffee brewed in a copper pot, the brain can suppress the tragedies of war and cultural erasure that accompanied Yugoslavia’s time in history. This cognitive dissonance may arise as a product of nostalgia: a feeling that can draw us back to both the best and worst of our memories [2].

Interestingly, the phenomenon of nostalgia was first defined by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, who noticed certain symptoms in Swiss mercenaries on distant expeditions. Hofer originally believed nostalgia was a neurological disorder caused by separation from one’s home [3]. In the present day, we know that nostalgia is not a disorder, but an emotion that can have neurological origins and consequences. We can see evidence of nostalgia even on the cellular level. This is exemplified by the brain-immune system interactions that arise from recalling autobiographical memories. For example, when participants are subjected to perfumes that evoke personal memories, they display significantly reduced levels of proinflammatory cytokines, such as tumor-necrosis factor-α [4]. These cytokines are a family of proteins that signal the activation of an inflammatory response in the body, which can promote the formation of tumors in some contexts. Therefore, lower levels of proinflammatory cytokines are correlated with improved brain health [5].

Despite these physiological benefits, nostalgia can still prompt the same emotional responses that Hofer observed in Swiss mercenaries: anxiety, insomnia, and reminiscent thoughts of home. But how do we make sense of separation from a home that no longer exists? Could Yugo-nostalgia serve a purpose beyond longing for a time of relay races, music, and perceived unity? One way researchers have begun to answer these questions is through studies examining how nostalgia engages the brain’s memory and reward systems [3].

In one study, researchers gathered a set of objects with nostalgic significance, including pencil cases and classroom bulletin boards, and objects with neutral value, such as office-related items. These objects were then shown to participants, who underwent a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan while they observed both the nostalgic and neutral stimuli. While participants viewed these pictures, the fMRI scanner detected their blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal—a proxy measurement for brain activity. An increase in neural activity requires higher levels of oxygenated blood flow, which results in a higher BOLD signal, which implies heightened neural activity [6]. To connect this neuroimaging data to the participants’ subjective experience of nostalgia, they were asked to self-report their feelings of sentimentality and familiarity with the objects.

Analysis of this data showed significant relationships between activation of the brain’s memory system, reward system, and nostalgic emotions. In particular, the results indicated co-activation of the hippocampus and the ventral striatum during experiences of nostalgia prompted by visual stimuli. The hippocampus is a brain region heavily involved in the formation of the long-term memories that precede nostalgia, while the ventral striatum is a region involved in motivation and reward processing [7, 8]. Thus, the researchers proposed a nostalgia-related network linking the two regions that reinforces the connection between a retrieved memory and its reward through dopamine transmission. Dopamine mediates reward responses by activating the nucleus accumbens: a brain region that processes enjoyable experiences, reward, and pleasure. This activation creates a reward prediction error, which is the difference between the expected and received reward, and favors pleasure-inducing behaviors [3]. By re-encoding autobiographical memories and making them a source of emotional strength rather than distress, the experience of nostalgia uses the past to build resilience against adversity.

Maybe this is why, each time I pass the Yugo car parked in front of our building, or stumble upon my dad’s old cassettes of the ex-Yugoslav bands Crvena Jabuka (“Red Apple”) and Ekatarina Velika, I am met with his anecdotes about growing up on the cusp of a civil war. Listening to his stories and to the ex-Yu rock cassettes, I am transported to a day in the 1970s: taking a train from Skopje to Split, preparing to watch the FIBA World Cup, and watching the country grapple with its first inklings of economic collapse.

Coupled with visual stimuli, music also plays an important role in evoking the experience of nostalgia. In one fMRI study, researchers postulated that when a song is heard, autobiographical memories unfold in parallel with the music’s “dynamic perception” [9]. To test this assumption, they relied on the method of tonality tracking, mapping how neural activity lines up with the musical interplay of keys and chords [9]. For this purpose, their team used computational modeling to turn songs into tonal space trajectories: representations of changes in pitch that mathematically model how music moves through keys. They then used fMRI to detect brain regions where the BOLD signal rose and fell in parallel with the trajectory of the auditory stimuli. Lastly, the researchers examined the degree of coupling between heightened BOLD signals and musical movement. They assumed that memory-inducing music would result in a greater degree of coupling because it would prompt higher brain activity [9].

As part of the music-listening task in the procedure, participants aged 19 to 33 listened to thirty excerpts of nostalgic songs that were released when they were between the ages of 7 and 19. Following the music-listening task, they were also asked to rate the extent to which they experienced happiness, sadness, autobiographical importance, familiarity, and nostalgia. The results showed significantly greater coupling between nostalgia-inducing music and brain regions in the reward networks. These included the inferior frontal gyrus, which is involved in the production of language, and the substantia nigra, which is involved in the production of dopamine and reward signaling. Greater coupling was also observed in regions associated with the brain’s emotion network, including the insula and cerebellum. The insula is involved in social and emotional processing and interoception—the perception of the inner sensations of one’s body—while the cerebellum controls motor coordination and higher-order emotional processing [10, 11]. These functions are conducive to nostalgia; therefore, their findings imply a correlation between the personal significance of music and its activation of the brain’s reward and emotion networks: when an auditory stimulus is more personal, the brain is more likely to follow along with the trajectory of the song. Again, it becomes clear that the reward and emotion-processing pathways of the brain are involved in perpetuating nostalgic memories, hinting at a mechanism that uses nostalgia as a means of emotional processing.

Researchers were also curious about the effects of music on nostalgia-induced brain activity in individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD), a neurological condition that damages dopaminergic neurons and results in bodily tremors, rigidity, and bradykinesia (slow movement). To counteract these symptoms, PD patients can undergo subthalamic deep-brain stimulation (STN-DBS) therapy. This treatment relieves the motor symptoms of PD by using electrodes to deliver electrical pulses above 100 Hz to the subthalamic nucleus, a brain region that is involved in both motor and emotional processing [12]. Despite its motor benefits, this treatment can cause emotional side effects, including apathy and difficulty recognizing emotive facial expressions [12]. To examine how STN-DBS influences emotional and nostalgic feelings, Trost et al. chose a sample of PD patients receiving STN-DBS, patients receiving medication, and a control group of individuals without Parkinson’s disease. As part of the procedure, all groups listened to twelve pieces of instrumental music. After listening to each excerpt, participants were then asked to indicate the intensity of their resulting emotions, including nostalgia, using the Geneva Emotional Musical Scale. Statistical analysis of the data showed that patients receiving STN-DBS reported heightened levels of nostalgia in response to the same music compared to patients receiving medication. These results strengthen the connection between music, emotional processing, and nostalgia in the brain, providing another explanation for the cult following that ex-Yugoslav music has gained in countries within the borders of the former Yugoslavia. Yugoslav music echoes at Southeast European weddings, national holidays, family celebrations, and car rides; its lyrics belong to none of our languages and all of them, making it easy to sing along regardless of one’s nationality or age.

Evidently, visual and auditory memories can both evoke feelings of nostalgia. But it is when they are combined that their emotional impact is most powerful [13]. This is what researchers showed in their experiment using electroencephalography (EEG): a neuroimaging technique that measures electrical voltage changes that are a product of neural activity. Here, Shuxiang et al. introduced participants to three different types of stimuli: auditory (nostalgic music released between 1999 and 2022), visual (games and objects sourced from a nostalgia-themed image library), and audiovisual (music videos and show opening themes). In response to these stimuli, they were asked to report their state nostalgia using a validated scale. Additionally, their EEG activity was recorded during the display of nostalgic stimuli to capture their real-time neural responses. The results of the EEG analysis showed that the audiovisual channel prompted stronger alpha-wave responses than the visual channel did alone. Given that alpha waves are associated with restful, meditative states, Shuxiang et al. concluded that multisensory integration creates a more “immersive and emotionally engaging experience” than purely visual elements [13]. In addition, the researchers found that the auditory channel activated alpha waves the most. Through the lens of Yugoslavia, this finding explains why so much sentimental value is packaged inside cassettes of ex-Yu rock, and why so many concert venues in the Balkans still reverberate the hearty sound of the folk rhythm. These songs stress unity across national and linguistic borders, claims Zlatko Jovanovic in his chapter of Nostalgia, Loss, and Creativity in South-East Europe [14].

Hence, music, imagery, and nostalgia have one prominent feature in common: they are inherently social experiences. They are created together with and in relation to other people. Ex-Yugoslav music combines the shared togetherness of these experiences into one, merging nostalgic sound and nostalgic memories. Indeed, nostalgic reminiscence almost always includes other people and situates the self in relation to them. Because nostalgia is a predominantly social experience, researchers wanted to investigate whether inducing nostalgia could affect the social behavior of help-seeking [15]. For this purpose, they provided participants with the New Oxford Dictionary definition of nostalgia (a “sentimental longing for the past”) and asked them to reflect on a nostalgic event from their own lives. This task was followed by a self-reported measure of help-seeking and a questionnaire assessing how nostalgic they felt while thinking back on their anecdotal event. The results showed that nostalgia connected to socially-oriented events increases help-seeking tendencies; in other words, participants who felt nostalgic were more likely to seek out help. Thus, there seems to be a social element to nostalgia that perpetuates a cycle of community-building. This phenomenon of Yugo-nostalgia, at its core, can be seen as an attempt to re-establish community and the tenets that come with it—collaboration and aid—through the comfort of shared memories and culture.

Could reflections on the past, then, collectively help us muse on the future? Bocincova et al. found that experiencing nostalgia turns people away from avoidant and toward approach-related psychological states [16]. In this study, participants were prompted to either write about a nostalgic or an ordinary life experience, such as grocery shopping. This was followed by the Flanker task: a measure that asks participants to make a right-hand or left-hand response based on exposure to congruent symbols (e.g. <<<) or incongruent symbols (e.g. <<>>), where arrows represent the intended hand response. To measure participants’ reaction and their tendency to avoid negative outcomes, the Flanker task assesses the accuracy of participants’ responses. While they were completing this task, the researchers used an EEG to measure the electrical activity in participants’ brains. The EEG results showed a reduction in the amplitude of error-related negativity (ERN), a neural marker associated with avoidance motivation, or the tendency to avoid negative outcomes. In other words, the more nostalgic people felt, the more motivated and less avoidant they were in completing the Flanker task.

Similarly, researchers showed that nostalgia increases our motivation to pursue our future, life-long goals [17]. In one study, they found a significant positive relationship between nostalgia and the tendency to pursue set goals. They also showed that the feeling of nostalgia is linked to increased optimism, especially in times of collective struggle, such as the COVID-19 pandemic [17]. Additionally, nostalgia is pertinent to populations with declining memories, such as patients with dementia. In a sample of elderly adults with dementia, Sedikides and Wildschut (2023) concluded that experiencing nostalgia in a controlled experiment setting heightens participants’ feelings of social connectedness, meaning in life, and self-esteem [17]. Building on this, researchers have attempted to implement nostalgia group therapy with the hope of improving patients’ cognitive health. During the group sessions, researchers asked elderly participants to recall a nostalgic event from their memory, and to reflect on important future events in relation to memories of birthplace, school days, holidays, and love. Huang et al. successfully implemented this treatment in elderly patients with depression and found improvements in all domains of quality of life, both physical and psychological [18].

What could all of these findings imply for the nostalgic adults of the former Yugoslavia? For one, embracing this nostalgia could bear positive cognitive benefits for the elderly populations of the Balkans, as evidenced by Huang et al.’s study of group nostalgia therapy. Embracing ex-Yugoslav rock could also promote greater alpha wave responses and states of relaxation. Above all, the neuroscience behind nostalgia could explain the relentless and undefeatable optimism of the Balkans: baton in one hand, flowers in the other. A country that spanned 250,000 square kilometers and six republics. Music, sports, unity. This is how nostalgia still runs in our minds’ circuits.

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