Psychology of communucation and Media Use

- Two or more persons, groups or institutions
- Communicator and recipient
- Actors bring different goals, presuppositions and experiences to the table

- encoded by communicator and decoded by recipient
- communication requires minimum common understanding of sign/symbol stock
- Sent and recieved message may differ

- Immaterial symbol carriers
- Material symbol carriers

- All technology-based means of encoding, transmitting, storing, retrieving and decoding information

- Actors/Participants
- Message/ Symbol/ Sign
- Symbol carrier
- Media
- Context
- Interactivity
- Intentionality

- Direct interpersonal communication
- Computer mediated interpersonal communication
- Human-computer communication

- Classical Mass Media
- "New" Mass Media

Internet has created intersections between mass communication and individual communication

- Perspective of psychology on individuals in their immediate and medial environment
- Examines communicative behaviour, experience, influencing factors and consequences

Media Psychology is concerned with describing, explaining, and predicting the experiences and behaviours that occur as
- a predictor
- during
- or as an effect of media use

-a class of tools and structures that is heterogenous in content
- Commonality: they enable novel forms of communication through the use of technology

1. Early media psychology (1900-1950)
2. Boom phase of media psychology research (1950-1985)
3. Consolidation of research in media psychology

1. Media selection
2. Media reception
3. Media Impct

- Verbal
- Paraverbal
- Nonverbal

- Physical characteristics
- Haptic Touch
- Proxemics
- Body language

- Emblems
- Illustrators
- Adaptors

1. Cues
2. Signs
3. Signals

Assumptions: Through cooperation a group can develop organisations and structures that represent selection advantage for all group members

- Kinship selection
- Direkt reciprocity
- Indirekt reciprocity
- Network reciprocity
- Group selection

Processes of behavioral drive

Traits x Situations = States -> Behavior

1. Physiological
2. Safety
3. Love/ Belonging
4. Esteem
5. Self-actualization

- Some needs are not represented
- Hierarchical structure can’t be confirmed empirically

Self-Concept
Self-Esteem

- real self
- ideal self

- unconditional appreciation by parents

- Basic human need for self-actualization
- Striving for self congruence

Humans as agents with ability for
- Intentionality
- Foresighted thinking
- Self-regulation

- Objective and motivation
- Self-efficacy
- Self-observation
- Self-evaluation
- Self- application

- External reinforcement:
Behavior can be enforced or punished by events and reactions in social environment
- Internal reinforcement:
Behavior can be enforced or punished by events and reactions within a person
- Positive affective self-reaction (pride) when approaching goals
- Negative affective self-reaction (shame, guilt) when goals are missed

- People as active, growth-oriented motivational agents

- Intrinsic motivation
- Extrinsic motivation

any behaviour that aims to control the impression that other people form of them in a desirable way.

- self-related goals that have yet to be achieved can be represented by symbols
- The effect of symbols is bound to their social awareness

- Personal Values reflect goals that motivate individual’s behaviour and serve as guiding principals

- Values can motivate behaviour
- Values are hierarchically ordered according to importance
- People differ in prioritisation of values

- Openness to new experiences vs. Preservation of the status quo
- Self optimisation vs principle orientation

- Individuals attempt to do what they believe will lead to what they desire

- Abilities
- Temperament
- Dynamic traits

the totality of all characteristics that make up the uniqueness of the individual

- Absoloute stability
- Relative stability

Differences between people that are important in social interaction were perceived and discussed and became part of natural language

- Openness
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism

- Curiosity
- Aesthetic sensibility
- Ingenuity

- Orderliness
- Diligence
- Reliability

- Sociability
- Assertiveness
- Energy

- Trust
- Compassion
- Respect

- Anxiousness
- Dejection
- Volatility

totality of all characteristics that make up the uniqueness of the situational framework
- Incentive structures
- Roles
- Environmental stimuli

- Strong situations
- Weak situations

- People show same/ similar behaviour due to conventions or norms
->Minor interindividual differences in behaviour
->Weak influence of personality on behavior

- Situations that allow differences in behavior
-->Influence of personality on behavior possible

Strong:
- Easy/Difficult
Weak:
- Moderately difficult

- Reactive interaction
- Evocative interaction
- Proactive interaction
- Manipulative interaction

- People react differently to the same situational stimuli
- Situations are perceived and evaluated subjectively
- Large differences between individuals in ambiguous situations

- Person elicit different reaction from interaction partners
--> These effect the person

- People actively choose situations
-> seeking out and avoiding situations that fit personality
-> actively controlling influence that situations have on their behavior

- People actively shape their environment, thus influencing situations to which they are exposed

Influence of situations and personality is interdependent

-> Influence of personality factors an behavior varies systematically across situations
-> The influence of situations varies in strength for different indivuals
-> Personality influences on behavior can only be generalises across situations to a limited extent
-> Situational influences on behavior can only be generalises across individuals to a limited extent

- Transmitter as information source
- Transmission device as encoder
- Signal as message
- Channel as signal carrier
- Possible technical interference (noise)
- Receiver device as decoder
- Receiver as addressee

- People don't process information, they create meaning

1. Perception
2. Cognition
3. Emotion
4. Motivation
5. Volition

processes of sensory experience

-Processes of evaluation, interpretation and memory

Processes of affective experience

Processes of behavioral drive

Processes of self and behavior

Processing of social information is sequential, but all subprocesses work simultaneously, i.e. in parallel

- Social information processing is sequential in the sense that there is a certain degree of temporal order of processes.

Social information processing is parallel in the sense that all sub-processes take place simultaneously and thus influence each other.

- Class of psychological theories that attribute a motivational role to the coherence, compatability or harmony of perceptions, memory, attitudes, judgements

- Dissonance theory
- Balance theory

Informative social influence: viewing people as source of information
Normative influence: for the sake of acceptance by others

- Humans as lay scientists: Systematic information processing
- Humans as cognitive misers: Heuristic information processing:
- Humans as social animals: Automates information processing

- System 1: Automatic, little cognitive effort
- System 2: Reflected, much cognitive effort

- Behaviours of individuals are (co-)conditioned by those of others and in turn Simultaneously condition those

- Focus is not on the individual, but on the structures of the social system.
- Structures become manifest and can be observed as communication

1. One cannot not communicate
2. Every communication has a content aspect and a relationship aspect
3. The nature of a relationship is conditioned by the punctuation of the communication on the part of the partners
4. Human communication uses digital and analog modalities
5. Interpersonal communication processes are either symmetrical or complementary, depending on whether the relationship between partners is based on equality or difference

1. Partly very theoretical and abstract in the basic assumptions
2. Unclear to what extent assumptions are empirically testable -> Scientificity?
3. Role of the individual is neglected

-trust

- Self-disclosure is key to the development of social relationships
- Social relationships evolve from superficial to intimate levels.

- a factual information
- A self-disclosure
- A relationship hint
- An appeal

Depth: extent of intimacy
Width: Number of topics, life areas

By expressing assessments about one's own person, a person makes himself
vulnerable and attackable and thereby signals trustworthiness.

- Parasocial relationships
- Affective Disposition Theory
- Identification with media figures
- Uncanny Valley

Adoption of the persona’s perspective, identity, feelings, and goals

Include at least three people who
- perceive themselves as members of same social category
- Have an emotional connection to that category
- And have some consensus about their understanding of the group and its membership

people draw self-esteem from being a member of a group

- Groups strive to distinguish themselves positively from other groups
- This is achievable by enhancing value of own group, or decreasing value of other group

- Individuals strive for a positive self-view and high self-worth
- Membership in a social group can, depending on the evaluation of one’s own group, positively or negatively influence one’s self-worth
- Evaluations of one’s own group always happens in comparison to other groups

- Social competition
- Social creativity
- Social mobility

re-evaluation processes are expressed in a change of the social comparison dimension. Groups with lower status can emphasise positive group characteristics

- The self-concept consists of different facets. Self-categorizations can take place on an interindividual or intergroup level
- Depending on personal characteristics and social context, different features of the self-concept may be more salient
- Social category must be cognitively available

- Personal Identity
- Social Identity

includes actions taken by members of disadvantaged groups to improve the status or living conditions of that group

typical representatives of a social category

generalised attribution of certain characteristics and traits to all members of a group.

- Reduce cognitive complexity
- Form of cognitive heuristic for predicting behaviour
- but: Classifications often wrong

Person characteristics: ambiguity intolerance
Situational features: cognitive load, intergroup competition
intergroup competition: Group competition increases salience of social identity and thereby promotes self-stereotyping and other group homogenisation

- negative attitude or negative emotions towards persons that exist solely because these persons belong to certain group.
- Has both cognitive and affective component, latter being more prominent
->negative attitudes and feelings that result from negative stereotypes

- hostile and pejorative behavior towards individuals that is exhibited because of their membership in a particular group. Discrimination is the behavioural expression of stereotypes or prejudices

- limited resources promote conflict between groups
Prejudice and discrimination increase when the situation is tense and there is - conflict over resources or conflict over resources or goals that are important to both sides

includes actions performed by members of privileged groups to improve status or living conditions of disadvantaged groups

- Interaction partners have expectations about the optimal level of adaptation
- These expectations are based on stereotypes towards members of foreign groups as well as social norms
- Interaction partners use specific communication strategies, specifically convergence and divergence, to signal attitudes towards each other and their social group in question

Strategy by which individuals adapt their communication behavior in terms of linguistic, paralinguistic, and non-verbal features to their counterpart type

Accentuation of verbal or non-verbal differences to interaction partners

- Contact between members of two groups leads to a reduction in prejudice and hostility

- Decategorization approach
- Recategorization approach
- Mutual differentation approach

1. Number and quality of the sensory channels involved
2. Extent of interactivity
3. Synchronous vs. Asynchronous communication
4. Number of recipients

- Reciprocal contingency
- Pseudo-interaction
- Asymmetric interaction
- Reactive interaction

The success of computer-mediated individual communication depends on the fit between medium and communication context

their ambiguity

their richness

- Speed with which feedback processes are possible (synchronicity)
- Number of available sensory channels or cue systems (sensory channels)
- Responsiveness of communication in media (interactivity)
- Possibility to personalise and convey personal feelings (amount of respondents)

Face-to-face communication not always the richest form of communication

-Development of a common understanding of interaction partners in the meaning of information that is already known (convergence)
- Tramsmission of differrent types of information that were previously unknown to the interaction partners (conveyance)

- immediacy of feedback
- variability of the linguistic symbols
- parallelism of communication
- Editability of communication
- Reprocessability of communication (storing and recalling)

- fast feedback and low parallelism

- low feedback and high parallelism and high reprocessability

Loss of the spontaneous, nonverbal, emotional and social character of communication

creation of a separate dynamic in interaction and relationship development

1. Computer-mediated communication filters out social cues and background information
2. Computer-mediated communication differs in terms of social cues are filtered out
3. The filtering of social cues can create positive and negative psychological effects

- Accumulation of misunderstandings in the sense of media richness model
- Information overload due to parallel processing in the sense of the limited capacity model
- Deindividuation

Deindividuation as a “state of reduced self-evaluation and evaluation anxiety leading to uninhibited antinormative behavior”

Absense of social cues favours perception of anonymity
Absense of norms makes it difficult to evaluate one’s behavior

- Egalization of status differences leads to democratisation of communication processes
- Compensation of missing social cues and contextual information through written language
- Often computer-mediated communication is more quickly judged as intimate, relationships develop more rapidly

Visual anonymity leads to more self-disclosure
Socially anxious people seek relationships through CMC

- people select media offerings actively and in goal-oriented manner
- Media selection can serve psychological needs and expectations
- Media selection represent one of several ways of satisfying needs
- If the expectations of a media choice are met, the probability increases that the same selection behavior will be shown again

- process of information selection in which recipients pay attention to certain stimuli from the multitude of available offers and examine them more closely

- Motivation/ reason/ gratification
- Satisfaction of these needs

- As part of a long-term learning process, individual experiences are condensed into general media knowledge

- Humans strive to maximise positive moods and minimise negative moods at all times
- Selection of media offerings based on the current mood
- Goal: Maintain or create as good a mood as possible

- Hedonic Valence
- Excitation potential
- Absorption potential
- Semantic affintiy

In aversive states

neurotic individuals

calming media

- Extraverts seek out stimulating situations more often

1. Differentation of hedonic motives
2. Meta emotion
3. Multiple motivations

- hedonic motives
- Social motives
- Existential motives
- Epistemic motives
- Self-related motives

- Feelings about feelings
- evaluation of one's own emotions

sense of experiences

- Different motives influence media selection behavior
- Behavior can be influenced by several motives at a time
- Computer-mediated communication is capable of delivering specific gratification to varying degrees
- different aspects of media use can be influenced by different motivations

- entertainment media
- information media
- Social media

- Processes that occur during the use of media
- Thoughts and feelings that media stimuli evoke in users

- describes a group of simultaneous cognitive processes that individuals apply to stimuli and their mental representation in working memory

- Encoding into working memory
- Storage
- Retrieval of information during and after media reception

- No sequential model, subprocesses work simultaneously and interact with each other
- All processes need cognitive resources, these resources are limited and have to be distributed among the sub-processes
- Allocation of cognitive resources is both conscious and unconscious
- Distinction between resources required for processing and resources provided for processing

No complete breakdown
- Non-optimal continuation of individual sub-processes
- Memory for details disturbed

Pros
- Assumptions grounded in cognitive psychology
- Inspired much research
Cons
- Assumptions relatively unspecific lack of detail

1. Involvement
2. Flow
3. Presence experience
4. Transportation
5. Narrative Engagement

- Meta concept including cognitive and emotional processes and describes intensity of engagement with media stimulus

active and intensive information processing and elaboration of the media message

perception of intense emotions and feelings during media use

reflection-free complete absorption in a smoothly running activity, which one has under control despite high demands

- Concentration
- Merging of activity an consciousness
- Loss of reflexive self- awareness
- Feeling of being in control of the situation
- Distorted sense of time
- Perception of the action as motivating from itself

- Not play for to long
- Asymmetry of difficulty

- Recipients so engaged, that they are no longer aware that the corresponding situation is not real, but mediated via media
Spatial presence: subjecitve feeling of actually being there

the deliberate and nondeliberate short and long-term within-person changes in cognitions (including beliefs), emotions, attitudes, and behavior that result from media use

Acquired skills/competencies should remain available after the interaction is completed

- Stable media effect
- Positive persistence gradient
- Negative persistence gradient

1. Effects can be triggered by different characteristics of media
2. Media effects aure usually indirect
3. Media effects are usually conditional, I.e. dependant on personal factors and possibly also contextual factors
4. Media effects are usually transactional, i.e. effect processes involve interactions among person characteristics, media characteristics, context characteristics, media use and media effects

- Modality
- Content
- Structural features

- Media effect mediated by media selection
- Effect mediated by reception processes during or shortly after media use
- Effect mediated by changed attitudes or beliefs
- Effect mediated by other persons

- occurs when an individuals exposure to a certain stimulus influences his or her response to a subsequent stimulus, without any awareness of the connection. These stimuli are often related to words or images that people see during their day-to-day lives

Process of emotional numbing to emotionally arousing stimuli that is triggered by repeated confrontation with the same or similar stimuli.

learning through consequences of others (in media)

1. Akquisition
2. Execution

People are cultivated by television and see the world as it its conveyed on television. Television represents a socialisation instance that creates distorted ideas of reality in consumers

Convergence of worldview among viewers with intensive TV consumption into otherwise disparate groups

Viewers whose life experiences are congruent with television are most influences by television

The traditional image of the mass persuasion process must make room for people as intervening factors between stimuli of the media and resultant opinions decisions, and actions