Study guide: Introduction to Media Psychology

📋 Course Outline

1. Foundations of Media Psychology
2. Psychological Perspectives
3. Cognitive Psychology and Media
4. Social and Human-Centered Perspectives
5. Media Psychology Questions
6. Pervasive Effects of Media

📖 1. Foundations of Media Psychology

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Psychology: the study of how and why humans behave, experience emotions, and think
• Media: all forms of mediated communication
• Media psychology: uses psychological theories, concepts, and methods to study the impact of mass media on individuals, groups, and cultures
• Media psychology scope: Media psychology examines the interpersonal and intrapersonal psychological dimensions underlying the impact and use of any communication medium, regardless of the subject matter communicated.

💡 Memory Hook

Technological change → continually evolving media psychology

📖 2. Psychological Perspectives

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Social influences: arise because people are influenced by their interactions with other people, their environments, and their culture
• Developmental psychology: studies how people grow, change, and develop across their lifespan
• Positive psychology: Positive psychology examines positive emotions, engagement, and the promotion of strengths-based traits.

★ Must-know

• Important media psychology perspectives include: understanding information in different media environments, experiencing media technologies, studying social influences in media content and social networks, examining how media can support growth and change

Further detail

• Research on social influences includes:
  • identity development
  • learning
  • cultural influences
  • persuasion
  • media violence
  • stereotypes

💡 Memory Hook

Cognitive, Social, Humanistic, Positive, Developmental: C-S-H-P-D

📖 3. Cognitive Psychology and Media

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Cognition: the process of thinking and understanding

★ Must-know

• Cognitive psychology examines:
  • perception
  • language
  • attention
  • memory
  • problem solving
  • decision making and judgment
  • intelligence

Further detail

• Media psychology can examine how people understand information in different media environments.

📖 4. Social and Human-Centered Perspectives

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Humanistic psychology: Humanistic psychology is people-centered and holistic, focusing on people’s needs and experiences.
• Narrative psychology: Narrative psychology examines story patterns in life and the meaning people give to them.

📝 Essential Points

• Developmental psychology research includes:

  • identity stages
  • life transitions
  • physical and psychological changes

• Positive psychology focuses on positive emotions, engagement, and strengths-based traits.

💡 Memory Hook

Humanistic psychology centers people; narrative psychology centers life stories and meaning

📖 5. Media Psychology Questions

📝 Essential Points

• Media psychology asks how media influence thinking, relationships, attitudes, values, and beliefs about the world.

• Media psychology asks how media shape leisure and work time, limit and expand recreational outlets, and influence people’s sense of history and politics.

• Media psychology asks how reliance on communication technologies changes the proportion of mediated experience relative to direct experience of the world.

📖 6. Pervasive Effects of Media

★ Must-know

• Examples of social institutions incorporating media include:

  • schools
  • hospitals
  • political systems
  • military systems
  • religions
  • real and virtual assemblies

• Media shape how the following are conducted:

  • news gathering and transmission
  • advertising
  • political processes and campaigns
  • wars
  • diplomacy
  • education
  • entertainment
  • socialization

• The course describes a culture in which extensive entertainment and celebrity news can make people obsessed with celebrity and value appearing in media as a way to become somebody.

Further detail

• The course presents increased cellphone use as a phenomenon associated with effects on the vision of youngsters and teenagers.

• Television appearances and performances can make athletes celebrities who command multi-million-dollar contracts.

• Celebrity news can displace other news from front pages and prime-time agendas, so people may know more about The American Idol’s Paula than about Islam’s Osama and Russia’s Putin.

• Television can change sports by encouraging faster game action so that home viewers continue watching commercials between plays.

💡 Memory Hook

Institutions → practices → culture

📊 Synthesis Tables

Psychological perspectives in media psychology