Pamela Brown Rutledge, Ph.D., M.B.A.

Pamela Brown Rutledge, Ph.D., M.B.A. is Director of the Media Psychology Research Center. She is a speaker, writer and researcher.  Her expertise is in the psychological impact of narrative, and the impact on individual and group behaviors of social media and emerging technologies.  A co-founder of A Think Lab, which provides transmedia storytelling workshops for organizations and advocacy campaigns, Rutledge is also adjunct faculty at Fielding Graduate University, teaching media psychology, transmedia storytelling, positive psychology, psychology of website design, and the psychology of social media and emerging technologies.  In addition, she is an instructor at of media psychology at UCLA Extension and a member of the advisory board of the Internet Marketing Certificate program and instructor of audience profiling and transmedia storytelling for marketing at UC Irvine Extension. Rutledge is the editor of the Media Psychology Review, an online journal dedicated to bridging the research-practice gap to expand the frontiers of Media Psychology across traditional and emerging technologies.

Rutledge's current research focuses on technology's impact on individual agency, self-efficacy,and the balance between autonomy and collaboration in a participatory culture. Recent research involved the impact of the new media environment on creating community, the use of technology to promote self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation, and the role of pop culture in providing social validation.  Rutledge has also done research examining the impact of media on measures of cooperation and conflict between the U.S. and China using the Olympics as a focal point.