Memories You Can Dance To
Nostalgia's distinctive power gets us out on the dance floor.
Posted October 22, 2025 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
It’s the same at virtually every wedding I attend. Friends and family sit at tables throughout the reception tent, sipping wine and snacking on duck confit while the red-hot band on stage blasts out a festive wedding playlist. As darkness falls outside the tent, guests begin to migrate two by two from their tables to the dance floor until just about everyone in attendance is out there pounding the parquet to the beat of the band.
Invariably, however, there will be a few stray couples—typically parents of the twenty-somethings out on the floor—who prefer to enjoy the music from the comfort of their table. But when the band launches into “September,” those couples are out on the dance floor quicker than you can say “Earth, Wind, and Fire.” It’s not that they weren’t enjoying the Bruno Mars and Ed Sheeran covers, but something about hearing those opening trumpet notes from the 1978 classic reaches deep into their memory and yanks them right out of their seats.
We’re talking nostalgia , of course, triggered by hearing a song that was popular way back when they were in high school. But why should a 47-year-old song make them want to shake their groove thing when “Uptown Funk,” which is arguably funkier than “September,” leaves them in their seats. A recent study at Western University in London in Ontario, Canada, explored this question and shed some light on the unique power of nostalgia to get us out on the dance floor.
Familiarity, nostalgia, and groove
Previous research (along with our own personal experience) suggests that, in addition to intrinsic qualities such as tempo, rhythm, and melody, our familiarity with a given song is significantly related to the likelihood of our feeling the urge to move when we hear it. As catchy as we found “Uptown Funk,” for example, the first time we heard it, by our third, fourth, or tenth exposure to the song, sitting still while hearing it is a virtual impossibility. Taking this familiarity factor two steps further, however, the Western University study investigated whether a distinctive kind of familiarity—nostalgia—makes us even more likely to move when we hear a song than the simple recognition of having heard it before.
The 102 participants, ranging in age from 23 to 28, listened to 25-second clips of 40 top-ten songs, 20 of which were from the participants’ adolescent years, and 20 of which had been popular within the last three years prior to the study. As they listened to the clips, the participants were instructed to rate the degree to which the music made them want to move (an urge the researchers label as “groove”). The groove factor of the response was broken down into three different types: tapping (tapping one’s foot or hand along with the beat), moving (generally moving along or swaying with the beat of the music), and dancing (getting out on the dance floor).
Listening to the 40 song clips in randomized order, the participants rated them on a scale of 0-100 based on movement type (that is, the urge they felt to tap, move, or dance), as well as the degree of enjoyment, familiarity, and nostalgia each song produced in them. Data analysis was performed on all of the ratings to explore correlations between the three movement types, familiarity, and nostalgia.
Tapping, moving, dancing
When the results were processed, the older songs (that is, those from the participants’ adolescent years) rated higher in enjoyment, familiarity, and nostalgia, with nostalgia (not surprisingly) registering the greatest difference among the three reactions when compared with reactions to the more recent songs. The older songs also produced higher groove ratings in all three movement types (tapping, moving, and dancing). The decision to play older songs at any event at which the goal is to produce maximum pleasure among the guests is, thus, clearly a wise one.
Nostalgia and the urge to dance
In the question of how familiarity and nostalgia are related to the three different groove types (the primary focus of the study), an interesting finding emerged. Familiarity and nostalgia were both significant predictors of the urge to tap and move. Only nostalgia, however, significantly predicted the urge to dance.
And while the urge to dance was revealed to have a greater correlation with nostalgic songs than with songs that were familiar, additional analysis of the relative strength of relationships between movement ratings and familiarity types revealed nostalgia to be stronger than mere familiarity in all three movement types. In short, while hearing a familiar song can have us tapping our toes and swaying in our seats, the nostalgic songs put a little extra zest in that tapping and swaying, and eventually make it impossible for us to fight the feeling any longer.
As the results of the study suggest, if you’re putting together a playlist for an upcoming party, a sampling of catchy, familiar tunes will keep your guests happily swaying in their seats throughout the entire evening. But if you plan to have a dance floor at the event, and you actually want to see people on it, you’d be wise to make sure that some of those familiar tunes check your guests’ nostalgia box as well.
Sidhu RK, Urian DM, Zheng H, Grahn JA (2025) Throwbacks that move us: The dance-inducing power of nostalgic songs. PLoS One 20(5): e0318766. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0318766
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Hal McDonald, Ph.D. , a professor of literature and linguistics at Mars Hill University, is the author of the medical mystery The Anatomists.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.