Abstract
Mobile phones, television, internet services, games, and social media offer diverse and numerous opportunities for coping with stress in everyday life. Different disciplines have contributed to answering how these media are used for coping. Consequently, fragmented and disconnected research perspectives have evolved. To improve integration, we conducted a scoping review. A total of 318 articles met the inclusion criteria. Three main perspectives on media use for coping were identified: (1) stress and coping, (2) mood management and emotion regulation, and (3) media addiction and problematic media use. Each perspective has contributed to different aspects of the use of media for coping. Six advancements are proposed, which attempt to integrate perspectives and to guide future research on coping using media.
Highlights
Mobile phones, television, internet services, games, and social media offer diverse and numerous opportunities for coping with stress in everyday life
As we are interested in how media use is connected to ways of coping with stress and not in how media causes stress when used for other purposes, we focus on coping through media use and not on media as stressors
The research area can be grouped into three different research perspectives: stress coping (n = 133; 42% of the articles), mood management and emotion regulation (115; 36%), and media addiction (109; 34%; perspectives are not exclusive)
Summary
Television, internet services, games, and social media offer diverse and numerous opportunities for coping with stress in everyday life. If we experience stress more often over a period of time and, more importantly, if stress is not coped with effectively, it can have severe consequences for health and well-being (e.g., a negative impact on the immune system, Herbert & Cohen, 1993, or on fertility, Louis et al, 2011) It is certainly a severe problem if research has not yet been able to shed light on the use of media for coping such that “some very basic questions about media use for coping with stress remain unanswered” No review has captured these different research areas and, there has been no attempt to integrate conceptual approaches and to compare and relate findings
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
