Does the media we consume impact our emotions?

There’s a saying in Western philosophy, echoed in some other philosophical traditions globally: “the end of labor is to gain leisure.” It’s a reminder that for all of the toil and turmoil that we engage in our daily lives, the fruits of such labor come in securing a means to pursue our own self interests. Such a claim is a cornerstone of contemporary theorizing on psychological well-being, from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory. 

Perhaps I’ve taken this phrase a bit too literally, as I’ve devoted the last two decades of my life to the serious and rigorous study of entertainment and leisure, especially through media technologies. Although I’m unsure if we’ve collectively moved the needle on debates regarding the perils and pearls of an increasingly mediated daily existence, one thing is clear: media have, do, and will continue to play a critical role in how we manage our feelings and dispositions. 

The premise is both elegant and simple: our emotions and moods fluctuate throughout the day as we cope with myriad stressful or monotonous events, and we rarely have control over the many things causing our noxious mood states. However, one thing we have a great deal of control over (usually) is the media content we consume. In the 1980s, some of the earliest media psychology scholars proposed the theory of affect-dependent stimulus arrangement–what later became known as mood management theory. If we presume that some of the most common noxious mood states include frustration and boredom, we can start to see how different media content might be useful for disrupting moods. For example, research using television, films, and music found that stressed people benefit best from slower-paced content with a more relaxing tone, and bored people benefit from somewhat the opposite: action-packed content that requires a bit more attention.

We found these same effects with video games but with one really important caveat: gaming can also back-fire. How is that possible? Video games require a lot more attention to play, because they are interactive–the player has to monitor and respond to the action as it unfolds. Because of this, video games were especially good at disrupting boredom, but games that are too difficult ended up being an additional source of stress, which ended up stressing out already-stressed people. In a sense, we found that video games have the potential to be especially potent for mood repair, but too much challenge disrupted the effect. 

Studies like these are important because they remind us that entertainment media are quite functional in our day-to-day lives. Although it might seem that we’re just playing around and “amusing ourselves” in ways that pull us away from worldly concerns, it’s also the case that our psychological well-being depends on our ability to recover and be resilient–these latter notes being the focus of the latest scholarship into media-induced mood repair. Of course, others have found that some of mood management’s predictions don’t always hold up. For example, there are times where people do want to ruminate in noxious moods; such as when reflecting on the loss of a loved one or getting focused for a major event or competition. Yet even in these theoretical challenges, we see an enduring truth: we engage with media in ways that help us satisfy our needs. 

So rather, maybe we are just playing around, but there are good and useful reasons for doing so. Other theories of functional media use include uses and gratifications theory (that we have deliberate motivations for our media selections, with intended and unintended consequences) and the broader suite of selective exposure theories (of which, mood management is conceptually aligned with). 

In an increasingly mediated and hybrid society, it becomes even more crucial that we observe, describe, and explain our complex relationship with media content. Functional approaches do this by avoiding moral panics over presumed negative influences and instead, they step back to try and understand the role media plays in daily life. Such approaches are equally capable of understanding negative and positive influences (for example, the stressful impact of video games, or the broader discovery of “unintended consequences” through uses and gratifications theory), which makes them especially robust. 

Soon, we will be launching the latest journal of the International Communication Association, Global Perspectives in Communication. The primary focus of GPC is to provide an additional top-tier outlet for communication scholarship, and to do so in an open-access environment so that we can remove barriers to globally relevant scholarship. “Global” in our name is less about a specific focus on intercultural or international scholarship but rather, meant to be an open invitation to a journal built globally from the beginning: from our reviewer pool and editorial board to the many different regions and perspectives that we expect to be represented in our issues and volumes. We hope that if your own scholarship takes you into the study of human communication–from interpersonal interactions to massively mediated systems–that you’ll consider GPC as an outlet for this work. 

_{Featured image by Samsung Memory via Unsplash.}