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The confinement of the population into their homes as a result of COVID-19 has entailed a notable increase in the consumption of diverse media. This exploratory study aimed to examine how the increase in media consumption was related to subjective happiness and psychological well-being. For this purpose, a questionnaire was administered to a sample of Spanish adults (n = 249; 53.8% women; aged between 18 and 75, Mage = 42.06, SD = 12.37) to assess their consumption of different media before and during confinement. Moreover, participants were evaluated for hedonic, eudaimonic, social, and experienced happiness by using the Pemberton Happiness Index (PHI). The results underlined the great increase in the consumption of TV for entertainment and social networking sites (SNS) during confinement. Furthermore, it was found that higher consumption was negatively correlated with the level of happiness, so that, people who reported greater well-being, both subjective and psychological, spent less time watching TV and using SNS. In contrast, no association was found between the level of happiness and the consumption of news (regardless of the media) and radio. Therefore, it seems that far from cultivating greater happiness, those who engaged in heavy consumption of TV entertainment and SNS during confinement were less happy than those who did so more moderately and spent more time using other media or performing other activities.

Positive communication is being presented as a paradigm approaches imported from the recent positive psychology subdiscipline mainly inaugurated by Martin E. P. Seligman, which could be defined as that branch of psychology that aims to study the excellence, the psychological and subjective optimization of life and human happiness. In this regard, the objective of this work is to show the path toward what we call positive communication, which could be defined as the organizational communication that, regardless of other goals, promotes consciously or unconsciously the happiness and psychological well-being of the individuals. While the chances of confluence between human happiness and communication are still in a nascent state, there is a huge and promising field ahead to explore.

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