Stress and Entertainment. What’s the Connection?

The seminar is organized by the HSE University project group ‘Digital Media in Times of Pandemic: Reconstructing Spaces, Policies and Communications’ jointly with the Department of Communication Studies, University of Antwerp. Anouk De Ridder, Rowan Daneels, and Professors Sara Pabian and Heidi Vandebosch will present the results of their research project carried out in Belgium during the first lockdown last year and discuss suggestions for future research.

Professor Ilya Kiriya, Head of the HSE School of Media;
head of project group Digital Media in Times of Pandemic

In our project we examine the correlation between media consumption and trust, demonstrating different patterns in different countries. We are now looking for peers who can communicate the results of their studies at our open seminar.

I found a publication that piqued my interest, so we invited Belgian researchers to make a presentation at HSE University. The first thing COVID changed was the patterns of media consumption. People found themselves locked in closed spaces, and media consumption became their only source of leisure.

It is very important to study media consumption during the pandemic, since due to isolation, new media consumption practices evolved. With this in mind, we are organizing a seminar to acquaint our colleagues from HSE University with studies currently being conducted internationally.

Pandemic and Entertainment Media

For the current project, the Belgian researchers wanted to explore how individuals facing stress and uncertainty during the first COVID-19 wave in Belgium applied their coping strategies in selecting and consuming entertainment media. This research builds on Heidi Vandebosch’s previous work on the media use of prisoners and on Anouk De Ridder and Rowan Daneels’ current PhD projects on the consumption of eudaimonic and hedonic TV programmes and games.

Overall, the study indicates that people not only turn to television and media as a stand-alone coping strategy, but rather also select their entertainment in function of the specific coping strategies they apply.

People who use humour to cope with stress and challenges, seem to avoid content that would be about COVID-19, or of which they expect eudaimonic (so meaningful, thought-provoking experiences), but are rather looking for more straightforward, more hedonic experiences. Alternatively, people who lean more towards religious coping, do prefer those eudaimonic entertainment experiences.

This clear connection between the use of religion as a coping mechanism and preference for eudaimonic entertainment experiences is the most surprising research result. The research on eudaimonic wellbeing as an outcome of entertainment has recently been including a concept of self-transcendence, that is looking into the spiritual and human-centered component of this entertainment experience.

We are certainly not the first to make this connection with the concept of spirituality, but what was surprising to us is that this result was also found in a Flemish audience, which is overall, less religious than, for example, the population of the USA.

About the Research Group

The group is part of a bigger research unit MIOS. MIOS stands for Media& ICT in Organizations and Society. The idea behind it is scientific study of individuals’ uses of media and digital technologies in interpersonal relations and in interaction with organizations, to gain insight into computer-mediated communication, its applications and effects, and to pursue evidence-based communication strategies, instruments and policy. All of the involved individual researchers in this project are linked to MIOS.

During the pandemic (and especially during the first lockdown) the members of the project studied:

people’s food and cooking behaviours (e.g. the Corona Cooking Survey);
people’s physical activity; young people’s narratives about the crisis (and how writing instructions could affect their self-efficacy);
young adults’ COVID-19 risk perceptions and social distancing behavior

Currently, the researchers are also involved in several studies that focus on vaccine hesitancy and the impact of communication on the willingness to get vaccinated.

Heidi Vandebosch

Since 2005, I—together with my MIOS colleagues—have mostly been conducting studies on cyberbullying. In a few large scale, interdisciplinary and interuniversity projects we developed and evaluated evidence-based (technological) interventions, such as a serious game to promote positive bystandership, automatic detection systems for cyberbullying on social networking sites, and reflective interfaces that make young people think twice before they post a harassing content. At this moment we are involved in two European projects on online hate speech: Dtct (Detect then Act – coordinated by Textgain, Antwerp) and Nethate (ITN – coordinated by Prof. Dr. Arun Bokde, Trinity College, Dublin).

Building on our research on evidence-based interventions on online aggression (i.e. cyberbullying, online sexual harassment amongst young people and adults), we expanded our studies to the development and evaluation of technological interventions to address other types of health problems.

Currently I am working on different large-scale projects that try to tackle health problems related to chemsex, physical activity, food intake and radon exposure. The intervention (components) that are being developed and tested take different forms. In a project that focuses on adolescents’ mental health, we are investigating how the design of social support websites (such as Awel) can be adapted in such a way that it promotes posting, reading of and reacting to personal narratives that positively affects young people’s coping skills and mental well-being.

In two projects on chemsex and physical activity we study how Just-in-time-adaptive interventions that rely on the use of wearables to gather information about a person’s inner state (e.g. emotions) and context (e.g. location) and to also send messages that are adapted to these situations) may help to promote harm reduction practices and walking.

Anouk De Ridder

I joined the University of Antwerp and MIOS early 2018 as a PhD student. My project evolved in focus, but has always centered on audience experiences while watching entertainment television. It is an interdisciplinary project that looks at audience experiences and their influence on their interactions with the people around them.

I have conducted studies that span qualitative in-depth interviews to online experiments. This allows us to look at the topic from many different angles and understand both the cultural and psychological angles to entertainment experiences.

I am currently working on a study that tests the mediating role of entertainment experiences and narrative persuasion in destigmatizing outcomes of entertainment education in the form of an online experiment. After that, I will conduct one more study within my PhD project, looking at the role of perceived characteristics of comedians in audience’s reception of disability comedy.

Rowan Daneels

In October 2017, I started as a PhD student and teaching assistant at the University of Antwerp. My own PhD project, situated within the MIOS research group, focuses on how players of digital games – and more specifically adolescents between 12 and 18 years old – can experience so-called eudaimonic experiences.

While media entertainment such as games can evoke hedonic experiences such as fun and enjoyment, research in the fields of media psychology, communication, and even human-computer interaction has recently started to investigate more serious and emotional experiences that can be conceptualized as ‘eudaimonic’.

To finish up my PhD project, I plan to develop a model on adolescents’ eudaimonic game experiences and subsequently test the model’s cross-sectional relationships. This model intends to provide an overview of (a) which types of eudaimonic game moments are experienced and how they relate to each other, and (b) which antecedents (e.g., player preferences/motivations, personality) and outcomes (e.g., prosocial attitudes, moral reasoning) revolve around adolescents’ eudaimonic game experiences.

Sara Pabian

I joined MIOS in late 2010 as a PhD student and had the opportunity to collaborate with Heidi and other MIOS colleagues on different problem-oriented and solution-oriented research projects in the past ten years. The focus of my PhD project was on cyberbullying perpetration among adolescents and how this behavior can be linked to developmental characteristics.

As a postdoc researcher I worked on a 4-year project that focused on the long-term outcomes of cyberbullying victimization. More specifically, I looked at how (cyber)bullying victimization during childhood and adolescence can have an impact on young adults’ lives today.

Currently I am collaborating with Heidi and other MIOS members on the Nethate project, as well as on a smaller scale study on online aggressive behavior in different contexts among adults. I also collaborate with other MIOS researchers on the InFlood project. This large scale project is a collaboration between three Flemish universities and Flanders’ Food and is aimed at investigating the influence of food media on food consumption patterns in Flanders. At Tilburg University I am working on the TABASCO project together with academic and non-academic partners from six European countries, funded by Erasmus+. The goal of the project is to investigate how we can use influencers to prevent cyberbullying behavior.

My interest in influencers and influencer marketing comes from my teaching activities within the domain of strategic communication. At Tilburg University I also work on a project that focuses on the special bond that followers have with influencers. If you are interested in one of the projects or topics I am currently working on, feel free to contact me!

June 07, 2021