Model of Inspiring Media

Scholars have increasingly explored the ways that media content can touch, move, and inspire audiences, leading to numerous beneficial outcomes including increased feelings of connectedness to and heightened motivations for doing good for others. Although this line of inquiry is relatively new, sufficient evidence and patterns of results have emerged such that a clearer picture of the inspiring media experience is coming into focus. This article has two primary goals. First, we seek to synthesize the existing research into a working and evolving model of inspiring media experiences reflecting five interrelated and symbiotic elements: exposure, message factors, responses, outcomes, and personal/situational factors. The model also identifies theoretical mechanisms underlying the previously observed positive effects. Secondly, the article explores situations in which, and precipitating factors present, when these hoped-for outcomes either fail to materialize or result in negative or maladaptive responses and outcomes. Ultimately, the model is proposed as a heuristic roadmap for future scholarship and as an invitation for critique and collaboration in the emerging field of positive media psychology.

Integrating Media Selection and Media Effects Using Decision Theory

Media psychology researchers seek to understand both why people choose certain media over others and how media influence cognitive, emotional, social, and psychological processes. A burgeoning body of literature has emerged in recent years describing media selection and media effects as reciprocally linked dynamic processes, but research approaches empirically investigating them as such have been sparse. In parallel, technological developments like algorithmic personalization and mobile computing have served to blur the lines between media selection and media effects, highlighting novel problems at their intersection. Herein, we propose an integrative approach for building an understanding of these processes rooted in decision theory, a formal framework describing how organisms (and nonbiological agents) select and optimize behaviors in response to their environment.

Embodied Cognition and Media Engagement: When the Loneliness of the Protagonist Makes the Reader Sense Coldness (and Vice Versa)

Embodied cognition research documents the interplay between physical sensations and corresponding psychological experiences within the individual. Accordingly, physical warmth leads to a sense of social inclusion, and being socially rejected leads to physical coldness. In the current research, we demonstrate that these embodied cognition relationships also apply to a media consumer and a media character with whom the consumer identifies. In Study 1, participants (N = 120) read one of four narratives in which we manipulated identification with the protagonist and her social exclusion/inclusion situation. In Study 2 (N = 120), the narrative described the protagonist experiencing coldness/warmth in high/low identification conditions. The findings suggest that when the character experiences either the physical or the psychological state, the identifying consumer consequently experiences either psychological feelings or physical sensations, respectively. We discuss potential limitations of the study and also its contribution to media psychology and to embodied cognition research.

Conclusion

Media psychology—understood as the study of individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and actions in interaction with media and communication technology—can offer important insights on what remains to be understood about the way in which individuals work. One of the key goals of this book is to challenge the understanding of who a journalist or a news ‘user’ is and how their experience forms and informs the way in which they relate to the world around them. This chapter summarizes the lessons learned throughout the book and discusses the important role that psychological processes at individual levels (e.g., identity), interindividual levels (e.g., attributions), and collective levels (e.g., intergroup dynamics) play in journalism in light of the literature reviewed throughout the book.