The interplay of multimodal elements in popular Psych2Go YouTube Channel
YouTube has become an important platform for informal learning by combining entertainment with psychological education. This study examines Psych2Go, a popular YouTube channel that explains complex mental health topics through short animated videos. This study aims to identify the way narrative elements explain strict medical definitions in a relatable way, the way visual semiotic resources simplify abstract psychological concepts into understandable and engaging representations, and the way textual elements work alongside the animations to guide the viewer's attention and prevent information overload. Using a multimodal narrative approach, this study combines Jerome Bruner’s narrative theory and Theo van Leeuwen’s social semiotics framework to analyze the channel’s communication strategies. The findings show that narrative makes clinical information easier to understand, visual elements encourage emotional engagement, and textual elements improve clarity by highlighting important information. The study also finds that Psych2Go’s effectiveness comes from the combination of narrative, visual, and textual elements working together. Overall, this research provides a better understanding of how narrative and social semiotic strategies can be used in digital media to make complex psychological concepts easier to understand and more accessible to the general public.