De Gruyter Handbook of Media Psychology

Bailey, R. & Glenna L. Read (Editors). (Under contract/In preparation). De Gruyter Handbook of Media Psychology. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter.

Description: Media psychology is the discipline aimed at understanding how media facilitate communication and how communication itself shapes attitudes, emotions, and behavior. Media psychology research has been conducted since the early twentieth century. The development of topic-specific journals and scholarly organizations marked the recognition of media psychology as a sub-discipline of mass communication and psychology in the late 1980s. Since then, the field has grown and continued to develop rapidly as media technologies have advanced and proliferated. The ways we communicate have changed dramatically in some ways, and not at all in others. The tools and approaches to investigate the psychological processes related to media consumption have also progressed. For this reason, an updated compendium on media psychology is overdue. In the proposed Handbook of Media Psychology, edited by Drs. Rachel Bailey and Glenna Read, we will present an overview of media psychology as a discipline and chapters exploring media psychology in the context of new communication technologies and research tools. Invited chapters, with a diverse roster of the pre-eminent and emerging scholars in the field will address leading ideas and debates in media psychology, persisting lines of inquiry and new areas of interest, and discuss the most innovative and groundbreaking tools used to investigate these questions.