Throwbacks that move us: The dance-inducing power of nostalgic songs

Riya K Sidhu, Diana M Urian, Hong Zheng and Jessica A Grahn

PLOS ONE, 2025, vol. 20, issue 5, 1-11

Abstract: The urge to move to music, often referred to as groove, is influenced by various factors, including familiarity with the music. The influence of nostalgia, which involves familiarity but also includes pleasant, sad, and wistful emotions, remains largely unexplored. Here we investigate the impact of both familiarity and nostalgia on the desire to tap, move, and dance along to music. To evoke nostalgia, we selected popular songs from the participants’ adolescent years. More recent songs served as a low-nostalgia but familiar control. Participants completed an online experiment, rating songs based on their desire for three different movement types (tap, move, and dance), as well as enjoyment, familiarity, and nostalgia. Nostalgic songs elicited higher desire to move than familiar songs across all three movement categories. Additionally, both familiarity and nostalgia predicted move and tap ratings, but only nostalgia emerged as a predictor for dance ratings. Our results suggest a distinctive role for nostalgia, beyond the influence of familiarity, in motivating the desire to dance.

Date: 2025
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0318766 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 18766&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0318766

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0318766

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().