Comprehensive Review: Media Psychology, Digital IP Law, and Generative AI

Flashcards providing exact vocabulary definitions for key concepts across media psychology and mass communication theories, digital copyright and intellectual property law, and generative AI prompt engineering and data analytics.

Vamp Narrative

A media narrative identified by Benedict (1992) portraying a sexualized, young, and attractive woman whose behavior deviates from traditional sex roles and who is blamed for inciting the lust of a male attacker.

Virgin Narrative

A crime narrative identified by Benedict (1992) depicting a pure and innocent female victim attacked by vicious, monstrous assailants.

Emotion

Internal psychological and affective states that cannot be observed directly and must instead be inferred from behavior.

Literacy

The first medium of communication that required solitude for its effective practice.

Suspending Disbelief

A cognitive media experience where the distinction between fantasy and reality becomes blurred as viewers agree to accept onscreen characters as real human beings to share their experiences.

Uses and Gratifications Theory

A mass communication theory emphasizing the active, goal-directed role of audiences in selecting media content to satisfy specific psychological and social needs.

Social Cognitive Theory

A theory developed by Albert Bandura positing that humans learn behaviors by observing media models performing actions and subsequently imitating them.

Respect

The fourth and final stage of minority portrayals in mass media according to Cedric Clark's (1969) developmental model, following non-recognition, ridicule, and regulation.

Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC)

A form of multimedia communication that integrates and combines distinct media types in ways never previously possible, including blogs and social networks.

Mean World Syndrome

A phenomenon arising from heavy television viewing where individuals develop distorted perceptions that the world is an exceptionally mean and dangerous place, inducing fear and insecurity.

Vicarious Experience

A media process enabling viewers to safely experience the emotions of onscreen characters without personally being exposed to physical danger.

Parasocial Interaction

A one-sided psychological relationship where media consumers feel an intimate, enduring bond with a media figure or character whom they have never personally met.

Reflection Myth of Media

The common misconception that mass media simply mirrors or reflects the factual reality, values, lifestyles, and concerns of society without shaping them.

Public Service Announcement (PSA)

A persuasive non-commercial media message sponsored by a government agency or nonprofit organization (such as the Ad Council) to address public health and social issues.

Desensitization

The psychological process whereby repeated exposure to negative, violent, or aversive media stimuli leads to a reduction in emotional sensitivity and physiological responsiveness.

Cultivation Theory

A theoretical approach asserting that extensive, repeated exposure to television gradually shapes and cultivates viewers' perceptions of social reality into a convergent mainstream view.

Direct Effects Model

An early mass communication theory (also called the 'magic bullet' model) viewing media messages as directly and uniformly penetrating the minds of passive audiences.

Limited Capacity Model

A cognitive processing model premised on the principles that humans are active information processors and that cognitive processing resources are strictly limited.

Inattentional Blindness

The cognitive phenomenon where individuals fail to perceive visual changes or unexpected objects within a continuous visual scene because attention is allocated elsewhere.

Central Route to Persuasion

In the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), a path where receivers engage in effortful, deliberate cognitive evaluation of the substantive arguments of a message.

Peripheral Route to Persuasion

In the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), a path where persuasion occurs through low cognitive elaboration based on emotional appeals, attractive endorsers, or surface cues.

Third-Person Effect

The psychological tendency for individuals to perceive that mass media messages exert a greater persuasive or corrupting influence on others than on themselves.

Drench Hypothesis

Greenberg's communication hypothesis proposing that critical, highly memorable media portrayals or individual characters have a disproportionately intense impact compared to routine portrayals.

Doxxing

The malicious release of an individual's private or identifying personal information online to encourage public harassment.

Get-Up Protection

Legal protection under passing-off law covering the distinctive external presentation, packaging, business layout, and visual appearance of a product or commercial enterprise.

Design Right

An unregistered intellectual property right created in the UK under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 protecting original, non-commonplace functional and industrial designs.

Passing-Off

A common law tort designed to prevent one trader from misrepresenting goods or services as those of another, requiring proof of goodwill, misrepresentation, and damage.

Prior Use Defense

A legal defense in intellectual property disputes establishing that the accused party was using the trademark or design prior to the complainant's registration date.

Fair Dealing

A legal doctrine permitting limited, non-infringing use of copyrighted material without authorization for purposes such as research, criticism, news reporting, and parody.

Data Minimization

A core GDPR principle mandating that organizations limit the collection and processing of personal data strictly to what is necessary for specified business purposes.

Right of Publicity

The legal right enabling individuals—including digital creators and influencers—to control and commercialize their name, likeness, and social media persona.

Bring Your Own Persona (BYOP)

The workplace practice wherein employees utilize their pre-existing personal social media accounts and followings to market and sell employer products.

Data Imputation

The process of substituting estimated or calculated values (such as the mean or median) for missing entries in a dataset to prepare it for machine learning analysis.

Standardization

A feature scaling technique that rescales numerical data to exhibit a mean of $0$ and a standard deviation of $1$, also known as Z-score normalization.

Prompt Engineering

The practice of structuring, refining, and optimizing natural language inputs to guide large language models toward producing relevant, accurate, and aligned outputs.

Zero-Shot Learning

A prompt engineering scenario where an AI model executes a specialized task without receiving any prior labeled examples or task demonstrations in the prompt.

One-Shot Learning

A machine learning paradigm in which a model is provided with a single illustrative example in the prompt to demonstrate the desired output structure.

Few-Shot Learning

A prompt strategy that supplies a small set of labeled examples (typically between $2$ and $10$) to calibrate the language model's predictions and output formatting.

RACE Framework

A prompt construction framework encompassing four core components: Role, Action, Context, and Examples.

PARE Framework

A prompt engineering framework composed of Parameters, Alternatives, Refine, and Evaluate used to systematically guide and improve AI responses.

CAPITAL Framework

A framework utilized in customizing generative AI interactions across dimensions such as tone, personality, and interaction style.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting

A prompting methodology that improves model reasoning by breaking down complex, multi-step problems into sequential intermediate reasoning steps.

ReAct Approach

A paradigm that synergizes reasoning and acting in language models by alternating between generating thought-based rationale and executing tool/API actions.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

A system architecture enabling large language models to query external databases and authoritative sources dynamically without requiring model retraining.

AI Hallucination

The phenomenon wherein a generative artificial intelligence model fabricates plausible-sounding but factually false, ungrounded information.

Cognitive Verifier Pattern

A prompt engineering pattern that automatically breaks a broad, complex user question into smaller sub-questions to verify facts before producing a final answer.

Flipped Interaction Pattern

A prompt design strategy where the AI model initiates and asks questions of the user to collect missing context before formulating its solution.

Tail Generation Pattern

A prompt pattern utilized to maintain context, bridge conversational steps, and prevent catastrophic forgetting across continuous generative outputs.