Parasocial Relationships

11 Key excerpts on "Parasocial Relationships"

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  Mass Media Effects Research

  Advances Through Meta-Analysis

  • Raymond W. Preiss, Barbara Mae Gayle, Nancy Burrell, Mike Allen, Raymond W. Preiss, Barbara Mae Gayle, Nancy Burrell, Mike Allen, Jennings Bryant(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  18 Parasocial Relationships and Television: A Meta-Analysis of the Effects Edward Schiappa University of Minnesota Mike Allen University of Wisconsin_Milwaukee Peter B. Gregg University of Minnesota The normal definition used by scholars for what constitutes an interpersonal relationship is usually some version of the developmental perspective (Miller & Steinberg, 1970) that requires some exchange of information with the expectation of a continued exchange or self-disclosure of information. This definition is an extension or application of what constitutes a small group for small group communication and is an attempt to avoid a definition of a group that would include a collection of individuals at a stop waiting for the bus. The problem with defining a relationship with a media celebrity or character in a program as a relationship is that the relationship is unidirectional. Although opportunities for feedback exist, the ability for that direct connection of person to person generally is not possible. The perception by the audience member of a kind of relationship existing remains, however. Although conceptualized and operationalized in a number of ways, parasocial interaction can be thought of simply as any communicative interaction taking place parasocially rather than interpersonally. Just as all communicative interaction does not lead to interpersonal relationships, not all television, radio, or film viewing leads to Parasocial Relationships. For the purposes of this meta-analysis, a parasocial relationship is the perception of a television viewer of a relationship with someone known through the media. The relationship is obviously not a “real” interpersonal relationship because there is no corresponding self-disclosure from the viewer to the person on the screen

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  The Routledge Handbook of Media Use and Well-Being

  International Perspectives on Theory and Research on Positive Media Effects

  • Leonard Reinecke, Mary Beth Oliver, Leonard Reinecke, Mary Beth Oliver(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Studies suggest that Parasocial Relationships develop in similar ways to relationships with non-mediated others (e.g., Branch, Wilson, & Agnew, 2013 ; Lakey, Cooper, Cronin, & Whitaker, 2014). For example, greater exposure leads to more intense relationships (Bond & Calvert, 2014 ; Schiappa, Allen, & Gregg, 2007). Further, knowledge about the other increases with relationship length (Rubin & McHugh, 1987). Likewise, as in non-mediated relationships, the involuntarily break-up of Parasocial Relationships can be distressful (Eyal & Cohen, 2006). Accordingly, Parasocial Relationships with mediated others have much in common with orthogonal relationships resulting from face-to-face encounters in real-life settings. To avoid confusion, it is important to note that a couple of scholars have proposed a different conceptualization of parasocial interaction and Parasocial Relationships in the past than the one suggested here. These scholars have argued that both parasocial interaction and relationships refer to an identical concept, namely to a (short- or long-term) social bond that users develop towards a media character. From this perspective, both terms can be used interchangeably (e.g., Brown, 2015 ; Rubin & McHugh, 1987)

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  The Handbook of Children, Media, and Development

  • Sandra L. Calvert, Barbara J. Wilson, Sandra L. Calvert, Barbara J. Wilson(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Many scholars have used the term “para-social relationship” to describe the affective bond that develops between an audience member and a media figure encountered primarily through essentially non-interactive media, including television, movies, books, and music (e.g., Brown, Basil, & Bocarnea, 2003b; Caughey, 1984; Giles, 2002; Meyrowitz, in press; Rubin, Perse, & Powell, 1985). Giles (2002) argued that “once we have made a person judgment about a media figure, or attributed person characteristics to that figure (e.g., an anthropomorphized cartoon animal), then we will subsequently respond to that figure ‘as if ’ it occupies our physical space, thereby becoming incorporated into our social network” (pp. 283–4). Of course, Parasocial Relationships are characterized by minimal or no actual interactivity or mutuality. Thus, the term “parasocial interaction” implies that some form of pseudo-interaction occurs within the mind of the audience member (cf. Honeycutt, 2003). A distinction has been drawn between parasocial interaction and other ways of relating to media figures, including attraction, similarity, identification, and imitation (e.g., Cohen, 2001; Hoffner & Cantor, 1991; Rosengren et al., 1976). But there are multiple aspects to any relationship, and it is reasonable to assume that they are interrelated. For example, it has been argued that a parasocial rela-tionship with a media figure motivates identification and behavior change (Boon & Lomore, 2001; Brown, Basil, & Bocarnea, 2003a). Moreover, most research has not used clear and consistent labels for the different types of responses (Cohen, 2001), and very little research with young people has explicitly examined para-social interaction (Giles, 2002). For the purpose of this paper, the concept of a “parasocial” relationship will be used as a parallel to a “social” relationship, to refer to an affective bond that is formed with a media figure.

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  Encyclopedia of Children, Adolescents, and the Media

  TWO-VOLUME SET

  • Jeffrey Jensen Arnett(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  639 PARASOCIAL INTERACTION Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl coined the term parasocial interaction in 1956 to describe the imagi-nary interactions between the audience and TV variety show hosts, noting the “seeming face-to-face relation-ship” that viewers developed with these personalities. Children and adolescents, like adults, develop strong Parasocial Relationships with a wide range of individ-uals whom they encounter only through the media, such as musicians, actors, and fictional characters. Parasocial Relationships, or pseudo-friendships with media figures, are distinct from identification, which is defined as sharing or internalizing media characters’ experiences. Scholars suggest that Parasocial Relationships may reflect an innate motivation to form attachments to others, and they have likened the development of Parasocial Relationships to the process by which people form interpersonal relationships. Studies sug-gest that initial attraction to media figures motivates further efforts to “get to know” them, leading to increased confidence in predicting and understanding their behaviors, greater intimacy or parasocial attach-ment, and an increased sense of relationship impor-tance. Parasocial bonds are deeply felt and have many of the characteristics of “real” relationships. Audience members mourn the deaths of celebrities whom they knew only through the media (e.g., Diana, Princess of Wales) and experience real emotional distress when fictional characters die or become unavailable due to the ending of a television series. Many teens, for example, were distraught when the cult series My So-Called Life was canceled, due to their parasocial attachment to the lead character. Only a limited amount of research has examined parasocial interaction among youth. An early study showed that children who felt as though they knew TV characters were more likely to worry about the charac-ters and to feel as though the characters had com-municated with them during the show.

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  Characters in Fictional Worlds

  Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media

  • Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, Ralf Schneider, Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, Ralf Schneider(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  3 Limitations of Research on Parasocial Interaction Most communication and media scholars agree, I am sure, that the concept of parasocial interaction is undeveloped, and has remained that way simply because nobody has thought up methodologically acceptable ways to develop it. I’m presently working on one, which I will describe at rele vant points here, but it’s not an easy task, largely b ecause – as I continue to argue – it is really the job of psychology to define the parameters of parasocial behaviour, and psychology seems to have an even bigger problem with the concept. Let’s start by thinking about the parasocial relationship itself. For many psychologists this kind of experience is not strictly speaking a relationship at all, because all relationship theory is founded on the assumption of reciprocity . Understandable, because applied psychology – clinical psychology for example – is primarily concerned with the study of dyadic relationships, or specified relationships like families or occupational work groups. Even where interaction is conducted via the internet, we assume reciprocity – if you kept e-mailing someone and never received a single reply you could hardly say that you and that person had a relationship. After all, it could be that the e-mail address does not exist. _____________ 12 Maltby et al.: Worshippers. Parasocial Relationships 447 So the parasocial relationship is not like a social relationship, which is why the term parasocial is used. This, however, leads people to assume that the relationship must be ›imaginary‹, and that the person is experiencing an illusion that the media figure is somehow involved in a relationship with them – rather like the psychiatric syndrome ›erotom a nia‹ where people believe themselves to be sexually involved with a famous person. 13 This interpretation of parasocial phenomena has alienated many communication and media scholars from the broad concept, leading to charges that it ›pathologises‹ media users.

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  The Social Use of Media

  Cultural and Social Scientific Perspectives on Audience Research

  • Helena Bilandzic, Geoffroy Patriarche, Helena Bilandzic, Geoffroy Patriarche(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Intellect Books

    (Publisher)

  With what aspects of media do audiences develop relationships? It very much depends on disciplinary perspective. Cultural scholars have examined text–audience relationships; others have explored engagement with specific TV series or other media phenomena. Psychologists have traditionally treated audiences as passive recipients of media stimuli, whether visual images or concepts (violence, typically), but this research has often worked from the topic backwards – for instance, media as one factor that predicts aggression, or disordered eating, or behaviour change (e.g. giving up smoking).

  What much of this work tends to overlook is the fact that media are populated with people, or fictional characters, and so from a psychological perspective it makes sense to cast audience–media relationships as those between two sets of people – those using media (watching TV, logging on to the Web) and those producing it or, more commonly, featuring in it. The emergence of the uses-and-gratifications tradition in the 1970s placed the media user at the centre of the communication process, selecting media and favouring certain media over alternatives, and parasocial theory has attempted to explain how basic human responses to other human beings (or simulated humans) have played an integral part in that process.

  What Are Parasocial Relationships (PSR)? Origins of Research on Parasocial Phenomena

  From infancy, humans are bound into a relationship with media that is fundamentally social. Human faces, voices and bodies appear on TV screens, and children engage with a multitude of fictional characters with clearly defined identities and personalities. Throughout the lifespan, these media figures are experienced as meaningful others with whom we interact. If real, we may try to meet them or at least write to or e-mail them. We may fall in love with them. They may influence the course our life takes. Although this does not sound very much like interaction in the traditional social sense, it is safe to say that an individual develops relationships with media figures or at least the cognitive representations of relationships. Not social, then, but para

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  Children, Adolescents, and Media

  The future of research and action

  • Dafna Lemish, Amy Jordan, Vicky Rideout(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Parasocial Relationships refer to one-sided, emotionally tinged relationships that people (in this discussion, children) develop with media characters (Calvert & Richards, 2014). Most children will experience one or more Parasocial Relationships with media characters during childhood, usually forming this attachment with a favorite character from television, movies, or games (Brunick, Calvert, & Richards, 2015). Because these characters often exist across multiple platforms, it is unclear if one platform primarily drives parasocial relationship development, or if these media platforms work in concert to facilitate these relationships. To capture the social nature of these experiences, we define children’s Parasocial Relationships with media characters as a self-other relationship rather than a player – avatar relationship, wherein the character is simply a different graphical representation of the player.

  Research has demonstrated that children more effectively learn concepts like early math skills from media characters with whom they share a stronger parasocial relationship (Calvert et al., 2014; Howard Gola et al., 2013). Because creating a successful educational media character hinges, in part, on children being able to form a bond with that character, it is important to understand the components and formation process of these Parasocial Relationships.

  Describing Parasocial Relationships

  Recent research surveying parents demonstrated that children’s Parasocial Relationships are composed of three factors: attachment, character personification, and social realism (Bond & Calvert, 2014a; see Figure 1 ). We describe these factors and then apply them to the potential design of intelligent characters.

  Attachment

  Attachment is a fundamental part of children’s earliest relationships with other people, and has been studied at length in a variety of contexts. As defined by Bond and Calvert (2014a), attachment to media characters refers specifically to feelings of comfort, safety, and being soothed that children experience with a character.

  Figure 1. Dimensions of parents’ perceptions of young children’s Parasocial Relationships (Bond & Calvert, 2014a).

  Designing a character that fosters child feelings of safety and comfort relies heavily on certain perceptual components, particularly visual cues. One major perceptual concern is the uncanny valley. Roboticist Masahiro Mori postulated that as computer-generated beings approach humanoid form too closely, human viewers tend to have strongly negative, visceral reactions to them (1970; Mori, MacDorman, & Kageki, 2012). The uncanny valley affects children: for example, three-year-olds were fearful of and avoided an android with realistic human features (Ishiguro, 2007). Similarly, many viewers had negative reactions to the computer-animated characters in the 2004 film The Polar Express

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  Illusions of Immortality

  A Psychology of Fame and Celebrity

  • David Giles(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  43 Substitute relationships? Some researchers 44 suggest that socially isolated individuals may use television to satisfy their need for actual relationships, and some of the cross-cultural research into television viewing behaviour suggests that, especially for women (many of their sample were heavy mid-afternoon soap-opera viewers), para-social interaction may fill important gaps in social life. Other work suggests that there is a positive correlation between the FAME AND THE 'GENERAL PUBLIC' 65 formation ofgarasocial relationships and the amount of televi-sion viewed. The advantages of Parasocial Relationships over real ones may be those relating to user control; a parasocial partner does not interact with you, does not let you down, and therefore you have a degree of power in a parasocial relationship. Your partner can contain all manner of fantasy attributes that may put real potential partners in the shade. Parasocial interaction can provide you with the ideal partner; not only a living being with all the appropriate physical attributes, but also someone whose every move is publicly scrutinized. The feeling that we know 'the real person' behind the celebrity through the ex-posure of the media makes us feel also that we are under no illusions. As a fan of the British actor Colin Firth says: 'You don't know someone who you meet at a party until you get to know them ... I know as much about Colin Firth as I did my last boyfriend when I started going out with him.' 46 Perhaps the most blatant use of parasocial interaction as a substitute for real relationships is in the use of pornography. Indeed, the phenomenal success of the pornography industry may be all the evidence we need to demonstrate the psycho-logical importance of parasocial interaction.

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  Mediated Interpersonal Communication

  • Elly A. Konijn, Sonja Utz, Martin Tanis, Susan B. Barnes(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  He found that parasocial relationship qualities (e.g., idealization, intimacy, passion) were both lower and more specific if compared to those of a real friendship. Giles (2002) assumes that the general possibility for contact with a character enhances social involvement with him or her (see also Hoffner & Cantor, 1991:64). For many users, it might be inappropriate, for example, to fall in love with a fictional character, i.e. to accept processes of extensive passion, intimacy, and commitment (Sternberg, 1986; see also individual differences in the worship of celebrities, McCutcheon et al., 2003). In sum, it seems likely that paracommunication can only begin if a character is perceived to be authentic enough to conduct meaningful behavior and to perceive or anticipate the user. Otherwise, users would “only” engage in character perception and evaluation. Traditionally, parasocial interaction theory (Horton & Wohl, 1956) dealt with realistic mass media performers on television or the radio. Anchormen, for example, are realistic portrayals of human beings. They always behave in a natural way, and they never lack the social cues necessary to create a believable character. For the audience, questions about their reality status probably do not enter the equation. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that the users’ involvement with them can be defined as paracommunication (Krotz, 1996b). And even if parasocial interaction theory were discussed in the context of fictional mass media characters such as “puppets anthropomorphically transformed into ‘personalities’” (Horton & Wohl, 1956:216)—although this has seldom been done—one could argue that these figures are quite authentic, because their behavior is often scripted by skilled human writers in the context of dense narratives

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  Radio's Second Century

  Past, Present, and Future Perspectives

  • John Allen Hendricks(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Rutgers University Press

    (Publisher)

  Another key element of parasocial interactions is the lack of obligation, effort, and responsibility that they require of the spectator. Peters and Simonson (2004) 44 • Laith Zuraikat assert, “He is free to withdraw at any moment. If he remains involved, these para- social relations provide a framework within which much may be added by fan- tasy” (p. 374). This lack of obligation and responsibility is a key component of the parasocial nature of the podcast, as listeners of a podcast can choose to pause, stop, or even delete entirely the podcast that they are listening to, essentially end- ing the relationship with no repercussions. This ability to end a relationship and treat it as though it never occurred in the first place without any consequences is a major component of the illusionary nature of the parasocial relationship as “real” or tangible relationships with other members of society tend to be much harder to simply end abruptly. One of the main appeals of a parasocial relationship is the potentially consis- tent and repetitive nature of the relationship. As mentioned previously in the research of Dibble et al. (2016), one of the major components of a parasocial relationship is that the interaction between the host and the listener persists over an extended period of time through numerous repeated interactions. In this manner, the host of the podcast, or the “persona,” “offers above all, a continuing relationship. His appearance is a regular and dependable event, to be counted on, planned for, and integrated into the routines of daily life” (Peters & Simonson, 2004, p. 375). This constant false interaction can create an impression among the audience that they “know” the actor and help to develop this bond.

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  Mediated Identity in the Emerging Digital Age

  A Dialogical Perspective:a Special Issue of identity

  • Hubert J.M. Hermans(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Mediated Identity in the Parasocial Interaction of TV Susanna Annese University of Bari, Italy

  Electronic media contributes toward modifying the self as they shape it as a multivoiced construction. Television talk shows function as a space of parasocial interaction where ordinary people represented on the screen offer involving images of subjectivity for the home viewers. Through interpretative procedures, viewers integrate screen suggestions in the positions’ repertoire of their self. This study hypothesized that viewers co-construct identities through involvement in what they are watching and employed focus group discussions and content analysis to investigate this hypothesis. The results demonstrate recurrent comparisons contrasting the screen “other” and the real self. This categorization marks a strong involvement of participants and an interpretative reconstruction of television images. As such, identity is constructed in the dialogical relation between others and selves in a mediated relation whose only result is a self traveling through different repositionings.

  Social psychology and mass communication research have always been interested in the study of identity. The most innovative contributions propose a negotiated notion of identity that overcomes an essentialist approach. Identity is the product of social practices in which the individual is involved. This relational and linguistic perspective reflects social constructionism that assumes that

  selves, persons, psychological traits, and so forth, including the very idea of individual psychological traits, are social and historical constructions, not naturally occurring objects (Sampson, 1989, p. 2).

  These theoretical afterthoughts respond to a change of cultural perspective that conceives reality as interwoven in social relationships and proposes the self as an integral part of these relationships. Nowadays, social relationships develop toward virtual forms, and mediated interactions contribute to the structuration of identity. Electronic relationships contribute toward modifying the self as they shape it—not as a univocal structure, but a plural construction originating in the technologies of social “saturation” (Gergen, 1991).

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