Excessive Use of Electronic Media and Subjective Well-Being

Mass media is a huge industry which has been, most of the times, found to adversely impact the psyche of the viewer through psychological constructs like body image, self-esteem, emotions, social relationships, personality traits and various other similar factors and hence, the field of subjective well-being is no exception. Subjective well-being includes first and foremost measures of how people experience and evaluate their life as a whole. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2013) defined subjective well-being as a measure of three elements- life evaluation, affect and eudemonia. The review analyses the impact of electronic media on all three areas of subjective well-being separately. It was observed that the area of life evaluation had negative consequences from excessive media use and similar was observed for the area of affect. Considerable components of eudemonia, but not all, were also negatively associated with heavy use of media. No study was encountered which empirically studied the other components of eudemonia in relation to mass media. However, much research work entails that excessive media use is consequent of low subjective well-being but less influence is found on the eudemonic element.