Recent research has demonstrated that the use of hedonically positive interactive media content contributes to the satisfaction of recovery needs and is associated with recovery outcomes such as higher levels of cognitive performance and increased energetic arousal. The recovery effects of noninteractive media stimuli as well as of media content with negative affective valence, however, are less clear. The present investigation addressed this limitation of prior research on media-induced recovery. In an experiment (N = 99), participants were first exposed to a task to impose work strain and then assigned to one of the 3 experimental conditions: (a) a movie clip with positive affective valence, (b) a movie clip with negative affective valence, or (c) the control condition with no media exposure. The results demonstrate that both media conditions resulted in higher levels of recovery experience and cognitive performance than the nonmedia control condition. Furthermore, exposure to the video clip with negative valence resulted in higher levels of involvement and energetic arousal than exposure to the positive media stimulus. The findings extend prior research by providing a direct test of the recovery potential of noninteractive media and by revealing the differential patterns of recovery effects resulting from exposure to positive and negative media content.
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Rieger et al. (2015) studied this question.
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