Beyond pleasurable and meaningful: Psychologically rich entertainment experiences
Date
2025-02-06
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Publisher
PLoS ONE
Abstract
Entertainment experiences have been conceptualized as hedonic (pleasurable) or eudaimonic (meaningful), mirroring the hedonic and eudaimonic components of psychological well-being. However, psychologists have proposed a third component of well-being: psychological richness, which is characterized by variety, novelty, and interest. In this paper we explore the role of psychological richness in film and television entertainment experiences. Two studies, an experience sampling study (n = 28) and a survey (students in the US, n = 247 and general population in Germany, n = 289) show the prevalence of experience of psychological richness during media use and its positive relationship with well-being. A replication with a different scale (n = 291) demonstrates that psychologically rich entertainment experiences may have been previously been conflated by some measures of eudaimonic entertainment. Incorporating psychologically rich entertainment experiences as a third addition to hedonic and eudaimonic experiences can increase the intervention potential of media used to enhance well-being.
Description
This article was originally published in PLoS ONE. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0315596.
© 2025 Wirz et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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Citation
Wirz DS, Eden A, Ulusoy E, Ellithorpe ME (2025) Beyond pleasurable and meaningful: Psychologically rich entertainment experiences. PLoS ONE 20(2): e0315596. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0315596