I’m looking for information about psychological studies that prove that watching television makes people depressed and feel powerless. I’ve seen a few comments in different places, but nothing that explained the details of experiments performed or how good the evidence was. So is TV really bad for your mental health?
One experiment I heard about (on a TV program IIRC) involved, from memory, people after a day at work spending time doing either sport, hobbies (mainly craft-based pursuits, I think) or watching TV, and found that the people watching TV were by far the least relaxed.
I did a web search, but most of the mentions I found were from websites trying to sell filtering software/hardware, which made me think they weren’t especially to be trusted, especially as they never included any references to the scientific studies.
So to sum up, my question is, is there any evidence from research on adults that watching television can cause depression, stress, or feelings of powerlessness, and how good is the research? Or is the biggest danger I face ER-inspired hypochondria?