Digital Stress: Permanent Connectedness and Multitasking

This chapter examines how media can be used in pursuit and service of spirituality leading to subjective well-being. Spirituality is a complex, multidimensional concept, involving distinct and related outlooks on and experiences with sacredness, transcendence, connectedness, and deep truths. Aspects of spirituality are most germane to its investigation in media-use context such as: searching, experiencing, connectedness, and sacred. Spirituality as with many psychological constructs has traditionally been examined in relation to negative life events, often with spirituality seen as a coping strategy or aid. Research suggests that trait spiritual transcendence significantly predicts several well-being-related outcomes, such as positive affect, less stress, positive health perceptions, and social support. Religious beliefs and practices can predict the viewing of religious television, possibly as a way to avoid or reject secular commercial television. Integrating the ideas with principles of moral foundation theory, Tamborinis model of intuitive morality and exemplars (MIME) explains how sensitivity to certain moral foundations might predict attraction to certain media content.