The Impact of Image Streams

In this media rich age of ours, a steady stream of images flows past our eyes everyday, on computers, televisions, billboards, posters, and in magazines, pamphlets, and books. How do we react to this flood of visual stimulation? How much of it registers in our conscious and unconscious mind? Do we become desensitized? What captures our attention, and what does not?

These are the kinds of questions I have been considering lately as a psychologist who has always been intrigued by the psychodynamic processes underlying visual images, especially their impact in contemporary media, such as cyberspace. And so I set out to conduct some research that might shed some light on these issues.

For three of my undergraduate classes on psychotherapy, consisting of a total of approximately 65 students, I presented a slide show of 200 numbered photographs at the rather rapid pace of five seconds each. The images included a wide variety of types, such as landscapes, animals, architecture, street scenes, still life, abstracts, people, and portraits. Before the slide show began, I asked the students to jot down the numbers of any images that stood out for them, to which they found themselves having a significant positive or negative reaction, for whatever reason. In this article I will refer to these photographs as the “standout” images.

Once the slide show finished, I asked them to close their eyes, take two deep breaths in order to clear their thoughts, and then allow one of the images from the slide show to surface into awareness. I will refer to this photograph as the “recalled” image. After giving them a few moments to focus on this image, I directed their attention to an instruction sheet that encouraged them to write down what they remembered of the photograph and to describe their reactions to several questions that Weiser (1993) often used in her psychodynamic approach to “phototherapy,” such as: What thoughts, feelings, or memories come to mind about this image? If you could go