ABSTRACT
Research on media entertainment clearly has become an established field of study within communication science and media psychology. Although entertainment media had been under-researched for several decades, their significance, content, and consumption were never really questioned. Katz and Foulkes (1962) therefore criticized the lack of systematic research on this topic as early as the 1960s. Beginning in the 1970s, empirical research on entertainment has grown considerably, and it has become a booming field since the late 1990s (cf., Zillmann & Vorderer, 2000). The diversity of entertainment media and their consumption by different users and audiences around the globe create a challenge for theory building and empirical research, and scientific results often seem valid for only a short period of time. Early mediated mass entertainment, such as low-cost novels in the second half of the 19th century or picture-rich newspapers in the early 20th century (Engel, 1997), did not stimulate much scientific concern.
