Abstract (eng)
This master's thesis examines correlations between the consumption of various news media and subjective happiness and life satisfaction in Japan via quantitative statistics. The first section provides definitions to happiness and life satisfaction and presents a historical overview of the concept of happiness. This part also examines variables that can influence happiness or life satisfaction and outlines the Japanese perception of happiness. Definitions of news, news consumption in Japan, and demographic differences within news consumption are described in the next chapter. This section furthermore provides a distinction between news seekers and news avoiders. After providing a summary of previous research on the connections between news consumption and emotions, the statistical analysis begins, in which, in addition to descriptive and bivariate statistics, the differences between different consumer groups are examined with the help of the World Values Survey. The calculations show that there are only a few statistically significant correlations between happiness or life satisfaction and the consumption of different news media. While there are demographic differences in news media consumption, there is little evidence that these trends make people generally happier or more satisfied in life, or have the opposite effect.