The Popularization of Psychological Discourse in the Media. Questioning the Boundaries of Genre

Psychological information in the media is increasingly pervasive with magazines and the Internet, providing a constant and readily accessible supply of information and advice. Magazines, especially women’s and teenagers’ ones, carry significant psychological content. Through the approach by Calsamiglia and Van Dijk (2004), the paper questions the boundaries of psychological discourse as applied to popularization. The strategies of specialized journalists, acting as knowledge mediators for the management of knowledge on psychology, emphasize what is presupposed, what is ‘reminded’ and what is newly constructed, according to the categories of scientific instruction and scientific journalism (Widdowson 1979). This intermediary discourse, viewed by some as a form of ‘translation’, and by others as a means of distortion, can be represented by means of a specific triangular communication model (science-mediator-public) (Moirand 2003).The final outcome is a list of explanatory descriptions, a routinized social activity that has led to the creation of a number of fairly stable genres, where metaphor plays a prominent role, as well as comparisons and analogies. In the limits of this paper, we will only deal with magazines. Both in magazines and on the Net, popularization is a matter of interaction as well as information, involving people and identities as well as messages.