Mental Rehearsal & Media Psychology
How media content prompts mental simulation of possible selves, futures, and social outcomes, extending the Mental Rehearsal Susceptibility Model (MRSM).
Founding conceptMedia doesn’t just entertain us. It teaches us who we could become.
Envision Lab studies how media, from everyday social platforms to emerging technologies like AI and virtual environments, shapes identity, mental simulation, and social cognition.
Mission
Understanding media’s role in shaping the self
We study how people perceive themselves, others, and society through media, from everyday social media use to emerging technologies like AI and virtual environments.
We pair media effects, social psychological, and communication theories with rigorous quantitative methods, using experiments, surveys, structural equation modeling, and multiple regression analysis to understand how media shapes identity, mental simulation, and social cognition.
Research Focus
Four threads, one question: how does media change how we see ourselves?
Digital Identity & Self-Perception
How social media and digital platforms shape self-concept, self-presentation, and identity formation across contexts.
Disability Representation in Media
How media portrayals of visible disabilities influence attitudes, stereotypes, and the self-perceptions of disabled audiences.
Emerging Media & Social Cognition
How AI-mediated communication and virtual or augmented environments reshape how people perceive and relate to others.
Approach & Methods
Theory-driven models, tested rigorously
Our research relies on quantitative designs, including experiments and surveys, alongside structural equation modeling (SEM) and multiple regression analysis to test theory-driven models of media effects, including measurement invariance and moderated-mediation analyses.
- Experimental & survey design in Qualtrics
- Participant recruitment via Prolific
- Structural equation modeling in R (lavaan) & Mplus
- Multiple regression analysis
- SPSS with the Hayes PROCESS macro
- Measurement invariance & moderated mediation
A simplified path model, illustrative of the moderated-mediation designs used across our studies.
Lead Researcher
Lilian Onianwa
Media Psychologist
About
Lilian’s research centers on media processes and effects, with an emphasis on how media prompts mental rehearsal of identity and possible futures.
Her work spans media effects on children, digital identity, and the representation of disability in media, grounded in quantitative designs, structural equation modeling, and multiple regression analysis.
Join the Lab
We’re building a team
Envision Lab is growing. If media psychology, identity, and quantitative methods are your kind of problem, we’d like to hear from you.
- Prospective Ph.D. & M.A. students Interested in media psychology and quantitative methods.
- Undergraduate research assistants Support data collection, coding, and literature reviews.
- Collaborators In communication, psychology, neuroscience, and computer science.