Entertaining Media Use and the Satisfaction of Recovery Needs: Recovery Outcomes Associated With the Use of Interactive and Noninteractive Entertaining Media

Recent research has linked the enjoyment of entertaining media to the satisfaction of intrinsic human needs (Tamborini, Bowman, Eden, Grizzard, Organ, 2010; Tamborini, Grizzard, et al., in press). The present investigation addressed the satisfaction of recovery needs through the use of interactive and noninteractive entertaining media stimuli and the resulting recovery outcomes. In an experiment (N = 160), participants were first exposed to a working task to elicit the need for recovery and then randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: 1) a video game, 2) a video recording of a game, 3) an animated video clip, or 4) the control condition. The results demonstrate that interactive and noninteractive media stimuli elicit different patterns of recovery experience. Furthermore, recovery experience was significantly related to enjoyment as well as subjective (energetic arousal) and objective (cognitive performance) recovery outcomes. Enjoyment mediated the relationship between recovery experience and energetic arousal. The results demonstrate that the effects of need satisfaction associated with the use of entertaining media go beyond enjoyment and may affect recovery and psychological well being. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for research on the recovery effects of entertaining media and for current needs-based approaches to media enjoyment.