This article is more than 1 year old Fridge magnets can be cool aid to holiday memory recall, study finds丨PuYou

 This article is more than 1 year old

Fridge magnets can be cool aid to holiday memory recall, study find丨PuYou

Some participants in Liverpool University survey said the travel mementoes were more important to them than photographs

One participant said of their holiday habit: ‘Now I don’t tend to take a picture of anything … I’ll just get a fridge magnet at the end.’ Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian

Whether holding up shopping lists or magnet for fridge hastily scrawled messages fridge magnets, fridge magnets are magnets highly functional holiday magnet machine souvenirs. And a new study suggests fridge magnet machine these trinkets custom magnet may also provide an important means of magnets for fridge fridge magnet calendar accessing happy – and not so happy – memories of past trips fridge calendar.

Pervasive as souvenirs are fridge magnet maker, surprisingly little research has investigated fridge magnet board what happens to them after people’s holidays have ended, and even less has focused on magnet board fridge magnets, even though we interact with them almost every day magnet board.

“If you think about fridge magnet souvenir how often you go into a fridge, it is very different from those cheese knives that you might buy, and then gather dust in a drawer, or a picture that gradually becomes wallpaper,” said Dr John Byrom, of the University of Liverpool, who led the research.

To better understand people’s relationships with their holiday magnets, Byrom and his colleagues conducted in-depth interviews – often in people’s kitchens, in sight of their fridges – with 19 Britons who owned at least 20 such holiday mementoes.

The research, published in Annals of Tourism Research, found that these souvenirs could help to preserve memories and trigger emotional responses, with some participants claiming their fridge magnets were more important than photographs as memory aids.

“If you go to any place, obviously in a day you could take 50 to 100 photos … Whereas now I don’t tend to take a picture of anything … I’ll just get a fridge magnet at the end,” one participant said.

Forgetting to buy a magnet can become a source of anxiety and stress. One women reported having to make a rash airport purchase, which she wasn’t happy about. And when Byrom recently presented his findings at a seminar, an attendee described having bought a magnet online and had it shipped from her holiday destination once she’d returned home.

“It was clear that when people talked through what their magnets meant to them, they were very easily able to generate these memories and responses of very specific events or people, including quite poignant examples of holidays that they’ve had with people who have died or children who have grown up and moved away,” Byrom said.