Working in front of and behind the camera, I became fascinated with the psychological impact of media interactions. This led me to media psychology with a deep focus on character identification, the mechanisms behind how we feel the way we do about the characters and personalities we come to know through mediated experiences, and how that influences our lives. This was a natural extension of my work as an actor and as one of the world’s top celebrity tribute artists performing in film, TV, music videos, and international events. I’ve witnessed the power of character identification from some very unusual angles.My current focus is organizing the definitions and measures of the complex psychological processes engaged by stories and characters through traditional and immersive media. Psychology brings the “why” to the “what” of media engagement and guides us toward asking the right questions to empower the decision-making of media creators and technology developers. My character identification thesis research focuses on the dimensions of audience response and behavioral impact, helping us understand media-based relationships, purposefully fine-tune them, and develop new avenues for engagement.Beyond its immediate applications to current media and technology, I want to extend my research to digital humans and next-level audience immersion utilizing a contextual interplay between identification, moral, cultural, and psychological factors based on statistical models applied to generative AI. Dissertation research is available at the Center for Open Science (https://osf.io/5j2uq/).