Alice Aldoukhov ‘22, Daria Lochoshvili ‘22, and Professor Dara Greenwood, Psychology Department

This summer I worked under Professor Greenwood’s guidance to start compiling materials for a Media Psychology textbook that she will be writing. I worked alongside another student, Dasha Lochoshvili, and we decided that each of us will review a topic every two weeks so that at the end of the month we would have four topic areas covered between the two of us. I chose to focus on media violence and parasocial relationships with media characters.

I used the PsycInfo database for the majority of my research.

I began by doing some background reading on the theories in media psychology to have a better understanding of the foundations before delving into the current literature. Using databases like PsychInfo and Communication and Mass Media Complete, I searched for all the articles published over the past 5 years on my chosen topics. I then compiled a few dozen of the most relevant. I considered the patterns that emerged in the literature, and organized what I found into categories such as “video games” and “real world vs fictional violence” for media violence, and “emotional wellbeing” and “gender” for parasocial relationships. Then I wrote a literature review, outlining what I had learned through my research – from relevant theories, to summaries of the studies, to an overview of the popular methodologies. I also listed some suggestions for studies that could have “spotlight” features in the textbook. I repeated this process in the second half of the program with the literature on parasocial relationships with media characters. These literature reviews are meant to serve Professor Greenwood as she writes the textbook, and I hope to keep assisting her research in the future.

As part of my work, I got to follow my interests and read the most fascinating articles.