Researcher Tonglin Jiang's research group published an article in Computers in Human Behavior revealing that nostalgia can effectively cope with the negative impact of cyberbullying on psychological well-being

Nostalgia refers to sentimental nostalgia and nostalgia for the past, a bittersweet and complex emotion
.
Nostalgia is often associated with
a warm memory or a precious personal item.
In the early days of psychological research, people saw nostalgia as a kind of mental burden or mental illness
that was crippled.
Freudian psychoanalysis believed that "the past is our baggage"
.
But now many studies have confirmed that it can serve as a psychological resource to help people fend off the negative effects
of threats.

In today's prosperous social software, the network plays an increasingly important role
in people's work and life.
The Internet is a double-edged sword, bringing convenience to people's lives, but also producing a series of negative effects, one of
which is the increasingly prominent problem of cyberbullying.
Everyone can be a victim of cyberbullying, and it's important to
study coping mechanisms.

Jiang Tonglin's research group members examined how nostalgia cushions the impact
of cyberbullying on an individual's psychological well-being through two studies.
A survey of repressive mediators found a model of repressive mediation: people who experienced frequent cyberbullying reported lower psychological well-being, but they were also more likely to feel nostalgic, which further improved people's psychological
well-being.
Study 2 used experimental methods to let participants recall their experiences of being cyberbullied and manipulate nostalgia by using the recall paradigm, and found that after being cyberbullied, participants in the nostalgic group reported feeling more psychological well-being despite being cyberbullied than participants in the control group
.

Regardless of age, previous research has focused on children and adolescents, with few studies focusing on adults who have been cyberbullied, and this study expands on the study
of adults who have experienced cyberbullying.
Nostalgia can effectively buffer the negative impact of cyberbullying on psychological well-being, which deepens people's understanding of nostalgia as a psychological resource and the positive role of
nostalgia.
Previous studies have found that people who experience cyberbullying respond to cyberbullying
by blocking bullies, changing usernames, and disfriending.
However, simply ignoring cyberbullying doesn't stop it from happening, nor does it mean it won't cause harm
.
Nostalgia buffers the negative effects of cyberbullying and offers a new and easy technological solution
to dealing with cyberbullying.
Mobile and social media platform designers can incorporate nostalgia into their products by recommending nostalgic images or music, and these efforts will mitigate the negative psychological effects
of cyberbullying.

Wang Ting, a 2018 doctoral student of Jiang Tonglin's research group, and Dr.
Li Hao of Tibet University are the joint authors of this paper, and researcher Jiang Tonglin is the corresponding author
.

The research work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China Youth Fund Project (32000767
).

Wang, T.
, Li, H.
& Jiang, T.
* (2022).
Fighting cyberbullying with past: The buffering effect of nostalgia.
Computers in Human Behavior,107518, https://doi.
org/10.
1016/j.
chb.
2022.
107518.

2022-10-13