Abstract
Enjoyment is the concept that grew up in a study of media communication during twenty years recently. This concept came from mood management theory that explained selection and reception actions of media, and mood management theory made hedonism a rationale. In a study of enjoyment, many phenomena of paradox who enjoyed negative feelings such as sad films have been reported. However, only the mechanism that concluded in an individual that why paradox was occurred was explained. Based on this problem, this study made a cognitive-affective mechanism model that comprehensively explained enjoyment of an audience of a television drama. A concept called meaningfulness was adopted to regard the mechanism that there was in the society. Empathy was considered to be two constructs called positive system and negative system, and meaningfulness was considered to be a construct called message evaluations. Enjoyment itself was added to those, validity of the model that assumed causation between four constructs were examined by covariance structure analysis. The result showed constant validity of the model. A fabric of enjoyment was suggested. It was able to explain not only paradoxical enjoyment but also non-paradoxical enjoyment. Based on these results, a cognitive-affective mechanism that why enjoyment was occurred among human beings was generally discussed from the viewpoints of empathy and morality and sociality.
