Media as Powerful Coping Tools to Recover from Social Exclusion Experiences? A Systematic Review on Need Restoration and Emotion Regulation through Using Media

Socially excluded individuals often use media to cope with their feelings of loneliness, restore threatened needs, and regulate their emotions. However, social exclusion experiences have often been studied from a social-psychological perspective, with little consideration of media-specific characteristics. Thus, this paper aims to identify which different media applications individuals use to overcome social exclusion experiences and how effective this is in terms of need restoration and emotion regulation. A systematic review yielded 119 studies investigating 274 coping tools and 134 underlying strategies. Results indicated that media represent multifunctional tools that enable behavioral approach, behavioral avoidance, cognitive approach, and cognitive avoidance coping. Overall, using these tools was effective in 59% of all cases, with different strategies being linked to more or less effectiveness. By highlighting the theoretical implications of these findings, this paper provides six suggestions that can guide future research within this field.