(INTER)DISCIPLINARY POSITIONING

My scholarly home is Media Psychology and Communication: a field that sits at the productive, sometimes contested crossroads of psychology, communication studies, and emerging media technologies. I align my intellectual identity with Rutledge’s (2020) definition of media psychology as the study of “the intersection between human behavior and media technologies,” a framing that deliberately spans from traditional broadcast forms to today’s algorithmically curated, participatory platforms. Within this disciplinary home, my work is focused on the mediated experience: how individuals perceive, interpret, and are psychologically transformed by their engagements with social media environments. This concern with psychological processes, identity, and self-presentation places me firmly “inside” what media psychology has long considered its core terrain (Giles, 2003; Valkenburg & Peter, 2013).

At the same time, my conceptual vision is intentionally interdisciplinary. I draw from personality and social psychology, developmental psychology, sociology, and mental health research. Methodologically, I align with a STEM-oriented vision of media psychology. I use quantitative tools to build theoretically grounded, empirically falsifiable models of how social media shapes identity and well-being. My disciplinary positionality is best described as a media psychologist who holds the psychological and the structural in simultaneous view, using quantitative methods to test models that are conceptually informed by multiple disciplines.

My sub-disciplinary home is the study of media effects, approached with a contemporary and critical inflection. Cultivation theory (Gerbner et al., 2002) demonstrated that long-term, cumulative exposure to media shapes perceptions of social reality. Applied to social media, algorithmic amplification accelerates and intensifies these cultivation effects, creating information environments where distorted social comparisons become unavoidable. Social Comparison Theory (Festinger, 1954) offers a complementary mechanism: platforms architecturally designed to facilitate near-constant upward comparison erode self-worth and fragment identity. Parasocial relationship theory (Horton & Wohl, 1956) adds a further layer through the one-sided intimacy audiences develop with influencers, which can function as idealizing selfobject experiences that, when disrupted, trigger fragmentation dynamics.

References

Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human relations, 7(2), 117-140.

Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., Signorielli, N., & Shanahan, J. (2002). Growing up with television: Cultivation processes. In Media effects (pp. 53-78). Routledge.

Giles, D. (2003). Media psychology. Routledge.

Horton, D., & Richard Wohl, R. (1956). Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance. psychiatry, 19(3), 215-229.

Marwick, A. E., & Boyd, D. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New media & society, 13(1), 114-133.

Stever, G. S., Giles, D. C., Cohen, J. D., & Myers, M. E. (2022). Understanding media psychology. Routledge.

Hurtado-Parrado, C., & López-López, W. (2015). Single-case research methods: history and suitability for a psychological science in need of alternatives. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 49(3), 323-349.

Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together. Basic Books. New York, NY.

Valkenburg, P. M., & Peter, J. (2013). The differential susceptibility to media effects model. Journal of communication, 63(2), 221-243.