Parasocial Relationships

• Parasocial relationships refer to one-sided relationships with celebs or public figures.

  • often a fan will feel very close to them despite there being no chance of reciprocity
• Absorption Addiction Model was proposed by McCutcheon (2002) to explain parasocial relationships

  • people engage in celebrity worship to compensate for deficiencies in their life
• Reasons people may be in a parasocial relationship (AAM):

  • Difficulty forming intimate relationships
  • Poor psychological adjustment
  • Lack of identity
• Absorption - looking for satisfaction in celeb worship makes a person focus intensively on their parasocial relational and achieve a sense of fulfilment - motivates them to become even more intensely attached
• Addiction - The fulfilment becomes addictive and the person engages in riskier behaviours to get mentally and physically closer to the celb
• Giles and Matby (2006) - identified 3 levels of parasocial relationships by using the Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS) in a large-scale survey
• Giles and Matby (2006) - Stages of Parasocial Relationships:

  1. Entertainment-Social Stage
  2. Intense-Personal Stage
  3. Borderline Pathological Level
• Giles and Matby (2006) - Stages of Parasocial Relationships:

  1 - Entertainment-social Stage = celebs are a source of entertainment and topic of lighthearted gossip - least intense level
• Giles and Matby (2006) - Stages of Parasocial Relationships:

  2 - Intense-personal Stage = May see celeb as a soulmate and they have an intense interest in the celeb’s personal life
• Giles and Matby (2006) - Stages of Parasocial Relationships:

  3 - Borderline Pathological Stage = Most intense level, takes celeb worship to an extreme, has obsessive fantasies, spends large amounts of money and may even engage in illegal activities such as stalking
• At the borderline pathological stage, people believe that if they were given the change to meet their celebrity in person their feelings would be reciprocated
• PEEL 1 - Limitation:

  • Bowlby‘s attachment theory may be a better explanation as it explains why some people are more likely to begin parasocial relationships
  • The AAM only explains the aquirement and maintenance of parasocial relationships
• PEEL 2 - Strength:

  • Has useful real-world applications
  • Maltby (2003) linked types of personality to levels of parasocial relationships along with body image in young girls
  • psychotics and insecure people are most likely to be at the BP Stage
  • Research can be used to improve professionals understanding of psychological disorders and help people struggling with psychological disorders
• PEEL 3 - Limitation:

  • methodology of research that has formed the basis of theories
  • correlational research so can’t establish a ‘cause and effect’ relationship
  • self-report measures depend on the accuracy of the respondents memory and the data is susceptible to social desirability bias
• The absorption aspect of the model refers to the ways in which an individual becomes consumed by their parasocial (e.g. they think about it all day everyday)
• The addiction aspect of the model refers to the increasing dependence a person has for the celebrity