Media Psychology Degree

Is the term media psychology a new one for you? Are you not really sure what this career entails or if it would fit your goals and aspirations? This is a fairly new professional world that is sure to be exciting for anyone who is interested in a career in a psychology related field.

Media psychology refers to the study of how society perceives, interprets, uses, and responds to our media focused world. In your capacity as a media psychologist you will be able to identify potential benefits or problems that exist because of a variety of media aspects. You will also work to encourage and promote the development of positively focused media. Keep in mind, media is used to refer to many types of mediated communication, like sounds, graphics, pictures, content, and emerging technologies.

The industry of media technology has recently arisen out of the need to research and understand the impact that media aspects have in both academic and non-academic settings. Psychological aspects, including behavior, cognition, and affect, are fully encompassed within the studies of this branch of psychology. Due to the significant opportunity that is present to understand how the media and psychology work together, this field is projected to continue its growth. It is crucial that you understand how media psychology draws from a variety of disciplines, such as communications, political science, sociology, neuroscience, rhetorics, computer science, communications, international relations, and anthropology.

It is common for media psychologists to study a few central themes. For instance, the effects of media and how it is perceived and how it can be persuasive is a main area of focus. In addition, many media psychologists also focus their studies on how current or dominant views tend to perpetuate themselves through media. This would have you studying how issues of sex, race, culture, ethnicity, specific professions, or gender are portrayed by the media.

As a media psychologist you will have the excitement of blazing the trail for this new industry, however, this will also be a tremendous burden to ensure that you create proper procedures and techniques that will be used by other people in this industry. It will be your responsibility to attempt to answer media related questions by developing an understanding of cognition, human behavior, and emotions with an equivalent comprehension of the technologies associated with the media. It is important that you understand that in your work as a media psychologist you will not only be concerned with the content of different medias, instead you will be expected to thoroughly look at the entire system.

Due to the fact that you will be studying the entire media system, there is no starting point and ending point to your studies. Instead, your focus will be a continuous loop that focuses on the technology developer, the content producer, how the content is perceived, and user responses. However, each of these factors of the loop are not studied individually, but rather how they interact with each other, how one can be dependent upon another, and how they coexist and coevolve with each other.

Even though this is a fairly new professional field, the demand for media psychologists will continue to rise since people are going to need help adjusting to the speed with which technology continues to progress. Media psychologists will also be working to hold authors and journalists accountable to a high level of professional standards. It will also be up to individuals in your industry to help people remember that how media technologies are experienced and interpreted varies from person to person, from one culture to another, and from one context to another.