What Is Media Psychology, and How Does It Work?

We now spend the majority of our waking hours surrounded by media and technology. As a result, media psychology has emerged as an important field of study. The interdisciplinary character of the field, as well as the continuously changing ways individuals interact with media in many aspects of their lives, from work to education to entertainment to social interaction, makes it difficult to describe.

Media psychology integrates work from a variety of domains, including sociology, media studies, anthropology, and fan studies, as well as psychology and communication. Furthermore, the topic is still fragmented across several disciplines, with many scientists conducting research on media's impact on humans who do not consider psychology to be their primary area of study.

Karen Dill's definition in The Oxford Handbook of Media Psychology: An Introduction conveys the complexity and breadth of the topic the best. "The scientific study of human behaviour, thoughts, and feelings experienced in the context of media usage and creation is known as media psychology."

The Evolution of Media Psychology

Early studies on the perception of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional canvas may be traced back over a century to the origins of media psychology.

Hugo Munsterberg's 1916 book The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, the first study to experimentally explore the way an audience responded to film, utilised these theories.

 When television became widely available in the 1950s, psychologists began to look into how media influences children. 

However, until 1986, when the American Psychological Association formed Division 46: Media Psychology, media psychology was not recognised as an official field within the study of psychology (APA). The division's initial focus was on psychologists who appeared in the media as experts, an objective that is still included as part of the division's mission. The Society for Media Psychology and Technology, which has subsequently changed its name to Division 46, has turned its focus to study on the affects and influence of media. 

In 2003, Fielding Graduate University started the first and only APA-accredited media psychology PhD programme in the United States, and David Giles released the first survey of the topic with his book Media Psychology.

Since then, the field has grown, with the publication of several scholarly journals dedicated to media psychology, the publication of additional books covering the field in whole or in part, and an increase in universities, such as Stanford, Cornell, and Penn State, dedicating an area of study and research to media psychology-related topics, usually within the communication department.

Media Psychology Topics

The field of media psychology is interested in a wide range of themes. Among them include, but are not limited to:

• Exposure to media depictions of violence increases aggression, how depictions of gender roles influence children's understanding of what it means to be a woman, man, or other gender, and how media messages can be constructed to persuade someone to donate to charity or behave in other prosocial ways are all examples of media influence.
• Online learning includes topics such as how in-person lectures should be modified to communicate effectively to online students of various ages, as well as the most effective ways to build up online learning platforms to maintain student attention and information absorption.
• How platforms can be adjusted to create a more comprehensive picture of the world than the silos of like-minded individuals that social media currently encourages, how relationships are impacted when they're conducted mostly or exclusively over social media, and how to reduce trolling and other negative online behaviours
• Why do we laugh and cry at movies, TV shows, and podcasts? How do tales influence our sense of self? How and why do lovers of popular culture gather together to establish supportive communities?

Research and Practice in Media Psychology

While many other fields of psychology have more well defined career paths, media psychology is still figuring out its extent and ambit. The most obvious objective for someone who studies media's impact through the lens of psychology is to work in academia as a research psychologist.

Scholarly research, on the other hand, is not the sole route for persons interested in media psychology. Media psychology can be applied in a wide range of industries, from entertainment and education to healthcare and politics, thanks to the ever-expanding world of media technologies.

People who design user experiences for everything from websites to virtual reality, for example, need to know how to construct a user interface that is easy to use and understand.

Similarly, beginning in elementary school, it is becoming increasingly vital to teach students media and cyberliteracy lessons. Media psychologists are uniquely qualified to design and implement these kind of programmes.

Media Psychology in the Future

While early media psychology study concentrated nearly entirely on the negative effects and influences of media, media and technology aren't all bad. What matters is how we use it. And, because media will only become more pervasive in the next years, we must learn how to work with it to maximise the advantages while minimising the negatives.

Media psychologists play an important role in these developments, and while they shouldn't shy away from highlighting the negative effects of media as it evolves, they should also focus more on how media can be used to improve well-being and prosocial outcomes in both academic and applied industry settings.