Parasocial Interactions and Relationships in Early Adolescence

A 'culture of celebrity' began to emerge in the twentieth century, profoundly impacting the social world. Recent years have seen the publication of an increasing wealth of literature focusing on people who are enthralled with celebritiesoften to the point of obsessiontermed 'celebrity worshippers'. The current paper systematically reviews this literature to gain a comprehensive understanding of the various factors associated with celebrity worship and to identify gaps in the literature. Papers were identified through a systematic literature search and 62 were deemed relevant for inclusion in the review. These provided evidence that celebrity worship may be related to demographic factors (e.g. age); personality factors (e.g. dimensions of the psychoticismextraversion-neuroticism model, materialism); religiosity; behavioural and cognitive-behavioural factors (e.g. fantasy proneness, obsessive behaviours); feelings about the self or the world (e.g. self-esteem); cognitive factors (e.g. cognitive flexibility, critical thinking); relationships with others (e.g. attachment style, romantic relationship style); attitudes towards the body, eating, and cosmetic surgery; and psychological wellbeing (e.g. depression, anxiety). The results are used to help researchers understand the individual and psychosocial factors associated with celebrity worship, and directions for future research in this area are identified.

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The affective and emotional engagement that audiences have with media figures has been studied in media psychology under the broad category of parasocial interaction. First coined by Horton and Wohl, parasocial interaction is usually interpreted as a sense of intimacy engendered through media use with one or more figures who would otherwise remain unknown to the user. Such figures include real people, dead people, fictional characters, and nonhuman figures both real and fictional. Over many years researchers have devised numerous ways of studying this interaction, mostly through the method of psychometric scaling. In most studies, media users have been asked to select a favorite figure (from a specific genre or category) and to agree or disagree with a set of statements about them, with a view to measuring strength of attachment. Earlier studies have been critiqued for conflating the interaction that takes place during an episode of media use (e.g., watching a TV show) with that persisting across time. It is now more usual to refer to the latter phenomenon as a parasocial relationship, and measures have been devised that differentiate this from the actual experience of parasocial interaction during media use itself. Various other phenomena related to parasocial interaction have been observed, including the different types of relationship, parallels between parasocial and everyday social interaction, the termination of parasocial relationships, and parasocial interaction with disliked figures.