Inspiring, Regulating, Multitasking, Modeling, and Shifting

The circle of Journal of Media Psychology’s editors is pleased and proud to present the first half of a double special issue that addresses the conceptual foundations of our dynamically growing field. In 2020, we had announced the mission:

To encourage a broad set of submissions, we implemented a two-stage process in which authors first suggested contributions based on extended abstracts – 2,000 words pitches (excluding references) that framed the basic groundwork for the larger concepts. Nearly 50 such proposals were received at this stage, and JMP’s editors worked together as a reviewer group to debate and discussion all submissions through asynchronous and synchronous meetings. Debates were fierce but friendships remained in tact¹, and the initial set of submissions were both high quality and highly inspiring.

From this initial set, we settled on and invited 12 author teams to create full papers. Each of these manuscripts was further curated by one editor based on their own unique expertise areas, and that handling editor consulted with the authors (and with external editors) co-constructively arrive at the strongest possible final articles. Of that selected list of 12, six of them are presented to readers in this current issue of JMP (Carr et al., 2021; Fisher & Hamilton, 2021; Oliver et al., 2021; Ozimek & Förster, 2021; Zamanzadeh & Rice, 2021; Wiradhany, 2021) and the remaining will be published in a future issue. The sorting and ordering has no bearing on the quality of the papers, and was mostly influenced by the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic in which our authors as well as editors are affected in systematic and inequitable ways (King & Frederickson, 2021; Staniscuaski et al., 2021) – to this end, we extend our most sincere gratitude for everyone’s patience and understanding. These current papers made advances into how we more deeply understand inspirational media, engage and manage our identities online, define and investigate media multitasking behaviors, and even how we model and test theory. We thank all authors and reviewers who participated in this unique and community-driven publication process, and we look forward to the second half of these papers published later.

As you will see from the Table of Contents, theoretical progress in media psychology is flourishing across numerous subfields and domains. Our impression was that many authors enjoyed the opportunity to pause the industrial production of ever-new empirical works (often that make more incremental advances on knowledge) and instead, to take the opportunity to more deeply reflect and elaborate on where there research program is currently standing with regard to conceptual progress. In presenting their efforts in JMP, we suggest that their robust and systematic theorizing shall fulfill an important “double-bridging” function for the field, namely (1) bridging past work to future perspectives through offering theoretical connectors to consolidated insight from existing research that future (empirical) studies can benefit from, and (2) bridging research lines and researcher teams who are interested in similar domains and questions so that effective collaboration can build on more solid, formalized and comprehensible theoretical foundations. From this, we hope that your work, too, will benefit from the existing collection of papers on theoretical consolidation and innovation.