Fighting fire with fire: The role of physiological arousal in media-induced recovery

Media use is often a means of recovering from stress and mental fatigue, and prior work suggests that emotionally intense media content may paradoxically support recovery. We examined whether physiological arousal contributes to this effect. In a preregistered, double-blind laboratory experiment, participants (N = 366) received caffeine or placebo, completed a cognitively demanding attention task, and then either watched an emotionally engaging video (positive stand-up comedy, negative horror, or a neutral documentary) or waited for four minutes. Caffeine increased skin conductance level and subjective arousal and reduced mental fatigue relative to placebo. All video conditions also facilitated recovery, with the horror video producing the largest improvement. However, we found no evidence that physiological arousal and media-induced emotion interacted to enhance recovery beyond their separate effects. In contrast to excitation transfer accounts, heightened arousal neither strengthened affective responding nor improved recovery beyond the effects of media exposure alone.