Introduction to Positive Media Psychology

Arthur A. Raney, Sophie H. Janicke-Bowles, Mary Beth Oliver, Katherine R. Dale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000295870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Introduction to Positive Media Psychology summarizes and synthesizes the key concepts, theories, and empirical findings on the positive emotional, cognitive, and behavioral effects of media use. In doing so, the book offers the first systematic overview of the emerging field of positive media psychology.

The authors draw on a growing body of scholarship that explores the positive sides of media use, including fostering one's own well-being; creating greater connectedness with others; cultivating compassion for those who may be oppressed or stigmatized; and motivating altruism and other prosocial actions. The authors explore these issues across the entire media landscape, examining the ways that varying content (e.g., entertainment, news) delivered through traditional (e.g., film, television) and more recent media technologies (e.g., social media, digital games, virtual reality) can enhance well-being and promote other positive outcomes in viewers and users.

This book serves as a benchmark of theory and research for current and future generations of advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars in communication, psychology, education, and social work.

1
WHAT IS POSITIVE MEDIA PSYCHOLOGY?

Source: Shutterstock 1577838799

To say that Rex Chapman’s life has been a roller coaster would be an understatement. High school basketball phenomenon. Celebrated college player. First round National Basketball Association (NBA) draft choice, leading to a 12-year playing career, front-office management positions, and broadcasting gigs. Along the way came excruciatingly intense pressure from fans, even for an 18-year-old living in a pre-social-media world, followed by numerous basketball-related surgeries, a long-time addiction to pain killers, depression, stints in rehab, ultimately culminating in an arrest for shoplifting $14,000 of merchandise from an Apple Store in 2014. He pawned the stolen goods to pay off gambling debts.

But Chapman persevered. He made amends for his crimes. He says he has been drug-free for several years. He returned to broadcasting as an analyst for college and professional basketball, and even showed up on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming block as the host of Block or Charge, a program inspired by one of his tweets. Chapman has become a social media influencer, with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers (@RexChapman), including athletes, celebrities, politicians, and even academics from around the world.

In many ways, Chapman’s social media posts have come to reflect what this book is all about. They are funny, thoughtful, and inspiring; more often than not, they reflect how media can be a source of positivity. Chapman explained his social media approach in an interview with ESPN:

I just think that everybody likes good things … everybody likes to feel good and believe the best in people … if [my Twitter feed is] providing anything, it’s just a little laugh during the day, just to remind yourself that we all just have thoughts … We think, we write and we’re all people just trying to get along.

(McGee, 2020)

TIME magazine proclaimed, “Rex Chapman’s Twitter feed is what a COVID-19 world needs” (Gregory, 2020). As the pandemic began to spread across the U.S. in early 2020, Chapman leveraged his online clout to raise money to help families financially devastated by the crisis. Speaking about his followers, Chapman said:

[T]hese are people who are looking for some good in the world. So it would only seem natural that they would also want to do some good in the world, right? It wasn’t so long ago that I was sleeping in my car. If it hadn’t been for the kindness of other people, willing to help me, I don’t know where I would be. I might be in the ground. So let’s make the most of a terrible situation and let’s show some of that same kindness.

(McGee, 2020)

Understanding how media content like that shared by Rex Chapman and countless others can be a source of goodness—of kindness, laughter, warmth, meaning, education, insight, support, transcendence—is the goal of positive media psychology. More specifically, positive media psychology is the field of study devoted to examining processes and relationships associated with media use leading to thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that contribute to individual well-being and flourishing. The field has deep historical roots in scholarship in the disciplines of communication and (positive) psychology, as well as education, sociology, philosophy, economics, political science, information studies, and marketing. However, it is only recently that varying approaches to examining “media for good” have been collectively considered as a separate field of study. The primary goal of this book is to offer an initial framework for the emerging field called positive media psychology.

Historical Roots

In many ways, media use has always been associated with positivity, at least from the vantage point of the audience. Media messages are sought as an escape from the frustrations of everyday life, to reduce our uncertainty about the world around us, to fascinate and amaze us. However, the scientific exploration of how media can positively affect our well-being is a new endeavor. This is not to suggest that concern about the effects of media are new. The first documented statement about media’s potential influence may have been offered by the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner who, in his Bibliotheca universalis, decried the “confusing and harmful abundance of books,” even in 1545. Thus began a centuries-long fear about the negative effects of media. The Industrial Revolution fueled the rapid development of new and improved mass communication tools. With each new form—from sensationalistic newspapers that seemed to “trade in filth” in the late 1800s to gangster films and comic books that critics argued spawned antisocial behavior in juveniles in the 1930s and 1940s, to the mass adoption of television in the 1960s—researchers repeatedly and increasingly turned their attention to exploring the potential negative impacts on individuals and society, leading to the development of numerous theories and conceptual models of media use and effects (see more in Chapter 2).

But audiences just could not (and cannot) get enough. Why? No doubt, media outlets provide vital news and public affairs information for daily living; they also keep consumers abreast of the latest products and services available. More than anything, though, they entertain. And what many researchers found was that all this informing, persuading, and entertaining could lead to various unintended, negative effects (like stereotyping, aggression, harmful health behaviors, political polarization, etc.). But it also brings us joy, brightens our day, makes us think, helps us cope, and so much more. The beneficial effects of media are numerous and equally worthy of scientific attention. That is the purpose of positive media psychology.

Over the course of this book, the reader will encounter the various ways that researchers have examined positive media effects. A few lines of inquiry—for instance, examining the intended effects of using media to educate, inform, and enlighten adults (Chapters 9 and 10) and children (Chapter 11)—are quite well-established (though they remain fertile fields of inquiry given recent technological developments). The study of media enjoyment also has a rich tradition (Chapter 4). More recent on the scientific scene have been investigations into how media content is used for purposes of reflection, contemplation, recovery, and spirituality (Chapters 5 and 6). Interest in these topics among communication and media scholars coincided with the emergence of the field of positive psychology (Chapter 3) in the early 2000s, which brought new theories and understandings of well-being and human fulfillment. The evolution and ubiquity of online and mobile communication technologies (Chapters 7 and 8) only highlighted the need to better understand how media could be leveraged for personal and social good across vastly different populations (Chapter 12). In short, positive media psychologists operate at the historical and intellectual intersection of media psychology and positive psychology, relying on theories and research from both fields, with the ultimate goal of exploring how audiences can use media technologies and content in the pursuit of beneficial outcomes.

Scientific Examination of Positive Media Use

Positive media psychology is a social science. Like other social sciences—anthropology, political science, sociology, economics, to name a few—positive media psychology applies scientific methods to describe, explore, and understand particular aspects of the human condition. The focus on the human—with our free will, autonomy, advanced symbolization and imagination capacities, self-reflexivity, ability to self-regulate, varying levels of development and maturation, among other characteristics—is what makes the science “social.” Natural scientists like physicists, for instance, do not have to consider the varying motivations of an atom; chemists need not worry whether two liquids of different densities might actually mix today just because they wanted to try something new. Because humans are unique and self-determining, the conclusions that can be drawn from social-scientific examinations are (1) necessarily reflective of the population sample expressed in the aggregate, (2) with results not necessarily reflective of each individual. Keeping this in mind throughout your reading of the text will be helpful, especially when you come across something that does not seem to “ring true” for you personally. If (or when) that happens, it does not mean that the finding is incorrect; it is just a reminder that you are not like everyone else in every single way.

The use of the scientific method presumes certain truths or realities about the phenomenon in question. That is, to examine “something” through the lens of science one assumes various things about that “something.” Science is not the only way to understand our world, media, or well-being; our personal experiences, intuition, traditions and rituals, voices of respect and authority can all provide insight and wisdom for daily living. However, science is the method of examining these phenomena that we employ through this book.

Science assumes that reality is objective and can be discovered. In truth, we may never discover everything about the world in which we live, but science contends that all reality can be discovered. Because reality is objective, we can observe it (empirical), and we can measure it, if we have the right tools. Scientific measurement is most often, but not always, expressed in mathematical or quantitative terms. Science is also deterministic, which means that it assumes a phenomenon happens for a reason, that everything has a (discoverable, observable, and measurable) cause. In attempting to examine causes and connect them to possible effects, science is governed by rules of logic, one of which is parsimony (that the simplest solution or explanation is always preferred). Science seeks to yield generalizable results, meaning that they can describe, explain, or predict the same phenomenon across various contexts. Science is also open in two senses. One is that it is open to modification, as new observations may provide different or more accurate explanations of a phenomenon. But it is also (ideally) open, accessible, transparent, and collaborative, so that methods can be improved, studies replicated with different populations, and analyses verified.

The goal of using science to examine various aspects of a phenomenon is to describe (e.g., what is it, what makes it different from something else), explain (e.g., what caused it, what does it cause, how is it related to other things), and predict (e.g., under what condition should we expect to find it again). The pursuit of those goals yields evidence about the particular aspects of interest. Ideally, that evidence can be used as the basis for, or in support of, a theory, which is a set of statements that logically lays out a description and explanation of a phenomenon, allowing for the prediction of that phenomenon. Because media content, audiences, and experiences are so diverse and complex, we will introduce numerous theories in the upcoming chapters.

We remind the reader: The word theory gets used quite a bit in everyday speech to refer to unproven explanations, guesses, hunches, and even conspiracies. That is not how we will use the term in this context. The theories that are discussed herein have been developed, rigorously tested through the scientific method, and evaluated by leading experts (i.e., peer reviewed). As scientists, we acknowledge that some theories end up being refuted and rejected by the scientific community. More often than not this is because better ways to observe a phenomenon have come along or something changes about the nature of the phenomenon in question. In such cases, this does not necessarily mean that science was “wrong” but rather that the scientific process actually worked as intended.

The evidence collected in support of the positive media psychology theories presented in the coming chapters has overwhelmingly come from the use of four specific scientific methods. We briefly describe each now. For a more detailed discussion of research methods in the social sciences, we recommend Babbie (2021); for media-specific research methods, Wimmer and Dominick (2014) is informative.

Content Analysis

Some people complain that news organizations only cover “bad” news, that stories of hope and inspiration are all too rare. If you wanted to scientifically examine such claims, the method you would use is content analysis. As the name suggests, content analysis is the method for the “objective, systematic and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication” (Berelson, 1952, p. 18). In other words, it is the application of the scientific method to describe media content. Content analysis tells us what and how much of some predefined category appears in a set of media messages. The method can be applied to any format: text, pictures, audio, moving images, or any combination thereof. You could analyze depictions of heroism in children’s cartoons, body positivity messages on Instagram, or words of encouragement in great speeches by U.S. Presidents. To do so, you need to identify what aspect of the content is to be examined (e.g., heroism, body positivity, encouragement), explicitly define how to identify that aspect, and then apply that definition to a sample of content (e.g., cartoons, Instagram posts, presidential speeches).

Content analysis is objective and systematic in that researchers develop operational definitions of content characteristics, which are specific and detailed so that other researchers could (1) reliably produce an identical (or at least an extremely similar) description of the same content, or (2) apply the same definitions to other content, thereby allowing direct comparisons between the two. For example, Dale and her colleagues (2017) examined YouTube videos that had been tagged as “inspirational” for the presence of religiousness and spirituality, among other things. To do so, the researchers operationally defined the presence of religiousness and spirituality in terms of symbols (e.g., crescent and star, Om, crucifix) and rituals (e.g., worship services, prayer, Bar and Bat Mitzvah) depicted onscreen. They then created a coding manual that explicitly defined what did and did not count for each category. They then used those definitions to count the number of religious and spiritual symbols and rituals portrayed in the inspirational videos. Because the analysis was objectively and systematically completed, other researchers could take the same coding manual, examine the same YouTube videos as Dale et al. (2017), and find the same number of symbols and rituals. Or they could take the coding manual, examine a different set of YouTube videos (perhaps ones with the most views), and provide results to directly compare with those reported in Dale et al. (2017).

As Berelson (1952) noted, content analysis also yields quantitative results. In the example above, the researchers described the YouTube content in terms of the frequency of religious and spiritual symbols and rituals depicted. This is a common way to describe content. Content analyses also commonly report proportions and length of time (or text). Finally, content analysis is generally performed on the manifest content of the m...