Bring together social researchers and news leaders to promote innovative community engagement

I greatly enjoy sharing my expertise in social psychology with the media industry. Newsrooms often call upon me to share my knowledge of nostalgia and how my research on nostalgia’s psychological benefits and pitfalls can help explain social trends. As satisfying as these conversations are, they typically feel one-sided; I am dispensing knowledge to help journalists, bloggers, podcasters and documentarians flesh out their stories. I rarely consider how these conversations could impact how I do my research or stop to think about how researchers and news leaders can work together to benefit their local communities.

My perspective on this issue has changed since participating in the American Press Institute’s Local News Summit on Rural Journalism, Community and Sustainability in June 2024, where I shared research on how hope and nostalgia promote psychological health and human progress. I was expecting another one-sided conversation but got a highly productive back-and-forth that has fundamentally reshaped my interactions with journalists, conveners and news leaders.

Abeyta attended the API Local News Summit on Rural Journalism, Community and Sustainability

Attendees were eager to learn about the research, and also shared stories of how hope and nostalgia impacted their rural communities. These stories and my expertise sparked new ideas and creative solutions for myself and news leaders alike.

Several attendees felt their rural communities were losing or had lost hope — they faced obstacles that made it difficult to feel optimistic about the future. I spoke of the cognitive model of hope, which views hope as a mindset that involves two forms of thinking: agency thinking — the enduring belief that one can and will accomplish one’s goals — and pathway thinking — mentally planning how to achieve one’s goals. I described evidenced-based programs to guide people through goal planning and execution to strengthen agency and pathway thinking.

The attendees and I discussed how one might adapt techniques from research to strengthen hope. One attendee left the session with the plan of setting up town hall meetings to identify community challenges and brainstorm creative solutions to inspire hope. We reasoned that giving community members a role in solving community problems should inspire the belief that the community can and will address the situation, and working together to generate creative solutions could strengthen pathway thinking.

We also discussed ways the news could encourage hope. One attendee had the idea of reporting on community members actively working toward solving local issues to inspire agency thinking, and another thought of editorials that bring together community voices on strategies for solving regional problems to encourage pathway thinking. I find this idea of strengthening hope via community voices fascinating and something I plan on testing in the laboratory.

Attendees also came to the small groups interested in nostalgia. I think nostalgia is a mostly positive psychological experience. My research finds that reminiscing about nostalgic experiences promotes well-being and inspires the confidence to pursue personally meaningful goals. To my surprise, many attendees had the opposite perspective; they viewed nostalgia as an obstacle to community progress. One attendee spoke of local objections to a revitalization plan steeped in the past; people could not imagine destroying a space that the community had so many fond memories of.

Discussing this situation reminded me of research on collective nostalgia: whereas personal nostalgia involves longing and wistful affection for your personal past, collective nostalgia involves longing for your group’s past, even if it’s a past you did not experience. Research suggests that collective nostalgia can be a barrier, but this is not inevitable; one study found that highlighting past examples of community tolerance inspired people to be more accepting of changing demographics.

Similarly, the attendees and I wondered if framing the past to highlight the spirit of progress and innovation could reduce objections to the revitalization plans. We talked about how the community space likely came about because the community of the past valued growth and progress for their town. Could modern residents be persuaded to embrace the spirit of progress their predecessors had? This question is also one I intend to test in the laboratory.

I left these small group discussions with ideas for how my research can be community-engaged. I hope the news leaders left with ideas about using insights from social research to better connect with and respond to their rural communities. I aspire to replicate my experiences in these small group sessions elsewhere. These types of convenings can be a model for mutual learning where researchers and news leaders can combine their respective knowledge, expertise and experiences to promote positive community relations and encourage community progress.

Andrew Abeyta, Ph.D., is a fellow at the Archbridge Institute’s Human Flourishing Lab and an assistant professor of psychology and director of the Social and Existential Motives Lab at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. He is a social psychologist whose research focuses on psychological factors, like the experience of nostalgia, hope, religion and supernatural beliefs, that promote social belonging and meaning in life.