Study guide: Introduction to Media Psychology

📋 Course Outline

1. Psychology and Media Foundations
2. Defining Media Psychology
3. Cognitive and Social Perspectives
4. Humanistic Positive and Developmental Views
5. Core Questions About Media Influence
6. Media Across Social Institutions
7. Media Effects on Culture

📖 1. Psychology and Media Foundations

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Psychology: the study of how and why humans behave, feel, and think
• Media: all forms of mediated communication

📝 Essential Points

• Media psychology continually evolves as communication technologies change.

💡 Memory Hook

Psychology studies behavior, emotion, and thought; media concerns mediated communication.

📖 2. Defining Media Psychology

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Media Psychology: uses psychological theories, concepts, and methods to study how mass media affect individuals, groups, and cultures
• Psychological Dimensions of Media: Media psychology studies the interpersonal and intrapersonal psychological dimensions underlying the impact and use of any communication medium, regardless of the subject matter communicated.

📝 Essential Points

• The scope of media psychology includes the impact and use of any communication medium, not only mass entertainment media.

💡 Memory Hook

Changing technologies → an continually evolving field of media psychology.

📖 3. Cognitive and Social Perspectives

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Cognitive Psychology: studies processes involved in thinking and understanding
• Social Influences: arise because people are influenced by their interactions with other people, environments, and culture

★ Must-know

• The listed cognitive areas are:
  • perception
  • language
  • attention
  • memory
  • problem solving
  • decision making and judgment
  • intelligence

Further detail

• The listed research areas are:
  • identity development
  • learning
  • cultural influences
  • persuasion
  • media violence
  • stereotypes

💡 Memory Hook

PALM-P: Perception, Attention, Language, Memory, Problem solving.

📖 4. Humanistic Positive and Developmental Views

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Humanistic Psychology: people-centered and holistic, focusing on people’s needs and experiences
• Positive Psychology: focuses on positive emotions, engagement, and promoting strengths-based traits
• Developmental Psychology: studies how people grow, change, and develop across the lifespan
• Narrative Psychology: examines story patterns in life and the meaning people give them

📝 Essential Points

• The listed developmental research areas are:
  • identity stages
  • life transitions
  • physical changes
  • psychological changes

💡 Memory Hook

Needs and experience → strengths and engagement → lifespan change.

📖 5. Core Questions About Media Influence

📝 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 shape 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.

💡 Memory Hook

Mediated experience expands some possibilities while diminishing others.

📖 6. Media Across Social Institutions

★ Must-know

• The listed institutions include:

  • schools
  • hospitals
  • political systems
  • military systems
  • religions

• The affected human enterprises include:

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

Further detail

• The effects of media on these human enterprises are legitimate subjects within the expanding scope of media psychology.

💡 Memory Hook

A media network linking schools, hospitals, politics, military systems, and religions.

📖 7. Media Effects on Culture

★ Must-know

• Endless entertainment and celebrity news can produce a culture obsessed with celebrity, in which appearing in the media is associated with becoming somebody rather than remaining a nobody.

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

• Television can influence sports by encouraging faster on-field action to retain home viewers during commercial breaks.

Further detail

• Increased cellphone use is presented as potentially affecting the vision of youngsters and teenagers.

• Athletes can become celebrities who command multimillion-dollar contracts because of their appearances and performances on television.

💡 Memory Hook

Greater media exposure → altered sports, celebrity culture, attention, and public knowledge.