The Media Psychology Blog

I am frequently asked questions about studying media psychology and about what jobs exist for media psychologists.

Here are a few questions I received recently:

• How are social networking sites viewed in Media Psychology?
• Are Media Psychologist working at most companies encouraged or discouraged from joining such sites?
• How companies feel about employees having personal information online?
• How are blogs, podcasts, and vodcasts used in the job?

Most of the answers to the questions like these are dictated by the environment in which a person works, particularly when a person is part of an organization of any kind, from educational to corporate. Different companies and organizations have different policies.

More important, however, is that media psychology is an emerging field. Therefore, there is no narrow or established definition of a media psychologist. Media psychology has as many applications as there are disciplines, from education, business, politics, and healthcare, to entertainment. Media psychology can involve research, assessment, and development of media technologies. It is not possible to say what media platforms a psychologist will use or know well, much less be appropriate to a situation.

The important thing to remember about media psychology is that is starts with psychology not media. Media psychology is an understanding of human behavior and human/media interaction that is applied to the assessment, development and research of continually evolving technologies.

A degree in media psychology should provide a thorough grounding in psychological theory (cognitive, developmental, social, affective, personality, biological bases) and an understanding of how those theories and the accompanying body of research applies to existing and emerging communication and media technologies. Media psychologists examine the way people use media platforms, the way people construct media content, and the way media impacts individuals and society.

This is definitely no one-size-fits-all kind of field. Media psychology provides a basis for determining which applications might best meet a given set of needs and how to best implement them. Individuals use different media platforms is specific purposes and goals. In business, for example, a goal might be to develop or promote better internal or external communications, for brand development and product development, or for customer relations and sales interface. In education, the goal might be to determine what media platforms best enhance the learning experience. Another example is social networking. This can be a a powerful tool , but whether or not to use it depends upon an individual’s or company’s goal.

Media psychology also examines the ethical issues that arise from emerging technologies, such as privacy, intellectual property, or negative behaviors such as cyber-bullying and addiction. It also addresses broader social issues such as conflict resolution and identity development.

The term media is often seen as a synonym of mass media. For most media psychologists, media is not restricted to any single platform. Personally , I think of media as a utility, like electricity. (But not one that should be heavily regulated.) Media psychology is about understanding how humans put media to use and how that changes their lives. For me, it is also about how to harness that power to make people’s lives better.

The holidays can be stressful. For me personally, I consume more candy, cookies, wine, and rich food over the two weeks surrounding Christmas than I do the entire rest of the year combined. I also exercise less, since I am frantically trying to keep up with real life while I also plan, shop, decorate, wrap presents, cook, and deal with the sensory overload of too many people in not enough space. Even if they are all people I love, which is not always the case, it gets emotionally tiring to be cheerful when you would prefer to sneak out of the house.

This rush of demands and activity is complicated by constant images of what holidays, families, and life are supposed to be like that fill every media channel. It’s a very human habit to hold up our own life against other, often unreasonable, standards that we see every day. From Father Knows Best and “Happy Days” to It’s a Wonderful Life, we see families helping and supporting each other in ways that we all would like. We see Martha Stewart’s ideal Christmas dinner, Brad and Angelina’s twins in their $60 million French chateau, Oprah’s Christmas tree, and Tom Cruise doing his holiday shopping. It’s pretty easy to fixate on what’s not right in our lives by comparison and feel, frankly, a little (or a lot) depressed.

Research shows that thoughts and feelings like these matter to how we feel. Cognitive psychology shows that they are, however, reciprocal, not unidirectional (i.e. Being down causes bad thoughts, but bad thoughts can cause feeling down, too.) Positive psychology focuses on using that cycle to turn things around by focusing on the positive and has been shown empirically to improve how we feel. Some good resources that talk about this phenomenon and techniques to help overcome negative moods include Christine Padesky’s Mind Over Mood, Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness, David Burns The Feeling Good Handbook and my friend Darlene Mininni’s The Emotional Toolkit.

Described simplistically, the goal is to recognize your negative thought patterns and habits and to refocus on the positive. Since the media contributes to many of the standards by which we measure ourselves, it is great when media can be used in positive ways to counteract some of the all-too-human tendency to judge harshly.

Cinematherapy is a a popular use of media for therapeutic ends. Therapists sometimes advise clients to watch movies to experience emotion and to see models of successful relationships and behaviors. More often, however, we “prescribe” our own treatment by watching a favorite movie to lift our spirits or provide solace. One of my personal favorites is the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. (Read this article on Positive Psychology at the Movies that describes positive psychology in detail and provides a list of movies that target particular strengths.)

Video games, unlike movies, are interactive. Interactivity demands that we engage and emotionally invest, thereby increasing the potential for learning. One great example is a game called Mind Habits that was developed to improve self-confidence and reduce stress by strengthening optimism and positive thinking. It is available for purchase online and through Amazon but you can try a MindHabits Demo for free.

This game is based on scientifically-tested techniques based on cognitive and positive psychologies and learning theory. It promotes optimistic thinking by reinforcing your positive aspects. The games also increase sensitivity to the positive elements in your environment rather than the negative, reinforced by repetition. The effect is cumulative, so the game experience teaches your brain to become more optimistic and less stressed. I played the games through the fall and again before the holidays. My personal favorite, The Matrix, shows you a series of faces and has you identify the smiling ones.

Mind Habits reminded me how easy it is to key into negative rather than positive imagery. We are learning from biology and neuroscience research that humans have higher sensitivity to negative images. Historically identifying lions and tigers was much more important to our daily survival than identifying flowers on the Savannah. It is sobering to realize how much our survival skills can contribute to keeping our focus on the “glass half-empty” rather than “half-full.” I also like that Mind Habits provides ways to monitor your progress. The website also has links to research, if you’re nerdy like me and enjoy that stuff.

Human evolution does not keep up with the speed of technological development. In today’s world, we are most effective when we are able to focus on positive and optimistic events in the world around us and are not preoccupied or incapacitated with anxiety and stress. The ability to be optimistic allows us to recognize opportunities, innovate, and risk. Optimism leads to increases in our physical and emotional health, our productivity at work and play, and our sense of well-being. Give Mind Habits a try and let me know if you think this media application works!

An article in the Financial Times (Lawyers use Facebook to serve papers) reports that an Australian lawyer received permission from a local court to serve papers using Facebook social network. It seems that Mr. McCormack, the Canberra solicitor, had been unable to track down his victims in more traditional ways. The article also notes that there have been occasions when papers have been served by email and text messaging for those who were illusive. Mr McCormack used an email address to locate the couple who was in default on their home loan. From the article:

Facebook, whose 140m active users make it the world’s most popular social networking site, said users could adjust optional privacy settings to prevent anyone from outside their personal network contacting them, a move that would close off a legal manoeuvre such as Mr McCormack’s.

While these events raise issues about privacy, legality, and even the appropriateness of delivering difficult information using media, the spreading use of social media networks and other forms of new media communication make it important to think about it from the perspective of the new media user. Just because a traditional media user wouldn’t consider looking for someone on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter, doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with those methods of communication. At the same time, we need to be mindful of the potential generation gap in media technology users so that the conversations (no pun intended) stay focused on the function and not the form of communication. It’s more important that people connect, than how people connect.

Many thanks to the folks at Online Education Database for including the Media Psychology Blog on their list of 101 Fascinating Brain Blogs. We are listed under “Technology” although because Media Psychology is  a cross-disciplinary field, we could have been under other groupings.

Media Psychology Blog on 101 Fascinating Brain Blogs List!

It was especially gratifying to be listed with some of my personal favorites, such as Cognitive Daily.  I am looking forward to checking out some of the others that I haven’t seen before.  Thanks OEDB.org!

Sramana Mitra has written a must-read column on Forbes.com, “Stop the Fear Epidemic.”

I have talked a lot about the climate of fear in the U.S.–it is a vehicle for attracting readers, viewers, voters, policy-endorsers, rights-waivers, and customers. It influences how scholars do research as much as how policy-makers legislate. The media often gets targeted as the root of this phenomenon. Clearly media channels are the way information is distributed, but the media producers are not on one side of an impermeable wall with the “rest of us” on the other. Media producers are us. Media content reflects what we believe and what we believe will work. Sure, there are people persuading other people about stuff, but there is no us and them. It used to be that when one guy was worried, the only person that knew was the local bartender or his/her best friend. Now, through he miracle of modern technology, we all know. (How many of you got the email about jury duty fraud?)

Mitra cites Judy Estrin’s book “Closing the Innovation Gap.” In her book, Estrin worries that the attitudes and beliefs that are essential for innovation, such as risk-taking, patience, and trust, are being extinguished by what Mitra calls a “fear psychosis.”

Mitra and Estrin are talking about entrepreneurship in terms of creating and inventing business, ideas, products. But we can also view entrepreneurship in terms of the individual’s psychological health. If an individual is unwilling to risk and trust, there is little possibility for good relationships, good parenting, and good decision-making because these, like business, all require a longer term view of hope and purpose. What is life and growth but serial innovation and personal entrepreneurship?

Unfortunately, there are biological reasons why fear is a successful attention-getter. Humans are hard-wired to notice change and sense danger. These were much more successful skills than being mellow and hopeful in the course of evolution when it came to stuff like tigers and starvation.

Our fear response has not kept with modern life. On the one hand, we have built some pretty good systems to keep tigers from prowling the streets. But at the same time, we also still have the amygdala with it’s heightened sensitivity to danger and highly efficient means of notifying the whole body. From Newsweek:

The evolutionary primacy of the brain’s fear circuitry makes it more powerful than the brain’s reasoning faculties. The amygdala sprouts a profusion of connections to higher brain regions—neurons that carry one-way traffic from amygdala to neocortex. Few connections run from the cortex to the amygdala, however. That allows the amygdala to override the products of the logical, thoughtful cortex, but not vice versa. So although it is sometimes possible to think yourself out of fear (”I know that dark shape in the alley is just a trash can”), it takes great effort and persistence. Instead, fear tends to overrule reason, as the amygdala hobbles our logic and reasoning circuits. That makes fear “far, far more powerful than reason,” says neurobiologist Michael Fanselow of the University of California, Los Angeles. “It evolved as a mechanism to protect us from life-threatening situations, and from an evolutionary standpoint there’s nothing more important than that.”

With media technologies, we now we have the means to broadcast those fears to millions of ears. So we have to work harder, engage our cognitive processing (i.e. think) to assess danger these day. Media plays a role by amplifying and distributing the worries. You don’t just see the tiger once, you see it every day a 5 p.m., 7 p.m. and 11p.m. and on hundreds, if not thousands, of blogs and news sites. It’s true that businesses use fear and desire to attract customers; but so do politicians and psychologists, if we’re going to be honest here. Not much use for a psychotherapy if you feel mellow, effective, and hopeful.

An important by-product of fear to consider in the public consciousness is the lack of self-confidence and belief in one’s control over life’s circumstances that fear responses create. (Psychologists like to call this self-efficacy.) Without a belief that you have control, you don’t try very hard. If there are no consequences to your actions, then people become opportunistic not hopeful and forward-looking.

The damage to self-efficacy and therefore to resilience is one of my concerns about all the government bailouts. I do recognize things that things may have gotten too far along for other solutions and that many people are worried and hurting–my point here is not to point fingers or bash the efforts to alleviate that, but to talk about what I believe will be a serious and detrimental psychological by-product if relief programs aren’t carefully crafted. The expectation of such wide scale bailouts tell me that people don’t feel in control and the implicit messages in all the policy-making–even if it is meant to help–just confirms it.

The rule have changed when the “big brother” rescues businesses that aren’t profitable or people who borrowed too much money. Who decides which businesses are “important” to save and or which people are worth saving? Why should you work hard to run a venture the right way (which is REALLY hard) if that’s not the criteria for success? How come the rules aren’t the same for everybody? Talk about disincentives to risk and hope.

Fear and a knee-jerk response to it, undermines self-efficacy, hope, and resilience and basic positive emotions essential to invent, risk, relate, and love. It’s time for us to think first, and write (or talk) second so we aren’t enabling the fear psychosis.