Media Entertainment as a Self-Regulatory Resource: The Recovery and Resilience in Entertaining Media Use (R²EM) Model

In recent years, the perspective of media use and its contribution to positive outcomes for its users has been expanded towards the media’s potential to facilitate recovery from stress and strain and to support the replenishment of physical and psychological resources. The accumulation of empirical findings in this area calls for a systematization and theoretical integration. The present chapter therefore reviews latest developments in recovery theory and systematically summarizes previous research on the effects of recreational media use. It then proceeds in presenting a new model, the Recovery and Resilience in Entertaining Media use Model (R²EM-Model), linking entertainment use to the short-term experience of recovery and to the contribution to long-term development of resilience-enhancing factors. The chapter concludes with a discussion of open questions and future challenges in this field of research.