What Is Media Psychology?

Media psychology is a newer branch of psychology that examines the ways people are impacted by media and technology.

Our lives are constantly saturated with media and technology and, as a result, studying the impact of media has become an integral part of psychology. However, the field's interdisciplinary nature and the constant changes in how people interact with media make the area of study difficult to define.

Media psychology draws heavily from psychology and communication scholarship, but also incorporates research from other fields, including sociology, media studies, anthropology, and fan studies. The field is scattered across many disciplines with many scholars who do not consider psychology their primary area of interest of research to be media's influence on individuals, rather a subtopic within a larger subject of expertise.

Perhaps the definition that best captures the depth and breadth of the field is offered by Karen Dill in The Oxford Handbook of Media Psychology: "Media psychology is the scientific study of human behavior, thoughts, and feelings experienced in the context of media use and creation."

History of Media Psychology

The roots of media psychology can be traced back over a century to early studies on the perception of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional canvas.

These ideas were applied in social psychologist Hugo Munsterberg's 1916 book, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, which was the first work to empirically explore how an audience responded to film. By the time television became widespread in the 1950s, psychologists had started to investigate how media affects children.

However, media psychology wasn't recognized as an official field in the discipline of psychology until 1986 when Division 46: Media Psychology was established by the American Psychological Association (APA). Initially, the division focused on psychologists who appeared in media as expert sources, an objective that is still listed as part of its mission. But Division 46, which has since changed its name to the Society for Media Psychology and Technology, has now shifted its focus to research on the effects and influence of media.

In 2003 the first, and so far, only APA-accredited media psychology Ph.D. program in the United States was launched at Fielding Graduate University. David Giles published the first survey of the field with his text Media Psychology.

Since then, the field has continued to expand, with the emergence of several scholarly journals specifically dedicated to media psychology, the publication of additional books covering the area of study, and an increase in universities, including Stanford, Cornell, and Penn State, which dedicate an area of study and research to media psychology-related topics.

Topics in Media Psychology

There are myriad topics media psychology seeks to explore. These include, but are not limited to:

• Media influence, such as whether exposure to media depictions of violence increases aggression, how depictions of gender roles in media influence children's understanding of their own gender identity, and how media messages can be constructed to persuade someone to donate to charity or behave in other prosocial ways.
• Online learning, such as the way in-person lessons must be adjusted so they can most effectively be communicated to students online across different age groups, and the most effective ways to set up online learning platforms to sustain student attention and uphold information absorption.
• Impact of social media, such as how platforms can be adjusted to create a more comprehensive picture of the world rather than silos of like-minded individuals social media currently encourages, how relationships are impacted when they're conducted mostly or solely over social media, and how to decrease cyberbullying and other negative online behaviors.
• Audience involvement, such as why we laugh and cry at movies, TV shows, and podcasts, how stories influence our sense of self-esteem, and how and why popular culture fans come together to form supportive communities.
  

Media Psychology in Research and Practice

While many branches of psychology have more defined career paths, media psychology does not because it is a new area of study still in the process of determining its scope and purview. The most obvious goal for someone who wants to investigate the psychological impact of media is to become a research psychologist in academia.

However, scholarly research is not the only path for people with an interest in media psychology. The ever-expanding world of media technologies leaves many opportunities to apply media psychology in a wide variety of industry settings, from entertainment to education to politics.

For example, people who design user experiences for everything from commercial websites to virtual reality require an understanding of how to create a user interface that is intuitive and engaging for people.

Similarly, it's increasingly important to teach children lessons in media and cyberliteracy starting from a young age. Media psychologists are especially well qualified to design and implement programs addressing this.

The Future of Media Psychology

While early media psychology research almost exclusively focused on the negative impacts of media, media and technology aren't all good or all bad. It's how we use them that matters. And, because media is only becoming increasingly ubiquitous, we must learn to maximize the positives and minimize the negatives.

Media psychologists have an essential role to play in these developments and, while they shouldn't shy away from shedding light on the negative impacts of media as it continues to evolve, they should also increase their focus on the way media can be used to increase well-being and prosocial outcomes.