Parasocial Relationships and Affective and Emotional Character Engagement

Abstract

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.