Parasocial Relationships Flashcards
Who created the celebrity attitude scale and absorption addiction model?
McCutcheon
What is the celebrity attitude scale?
A questionnaire used to assess the level of a parasocial relationship.
What is entertainment social?
The least intense level of celebrity worship. Celebrities viewed as a source of entertainment and fuel for social interaction.
What is intense personal?
The intermediate level of celebrity worship where people have greater involvement in a parasocial relationship with their favourite celebrity. Fans may have frequent intense, obsessive thoughts.
What is borderline pathological?
The strongest level of celebrity worship. People might perform extreme behaviours and have strong uncontrollable thoughts about their favourite celebrity.
What is the absorption addiction model used to explain?
Explains why people who usually have low social esteem seek fulfilment in the form of parasocial relationships.
What is ‘absorption’?
Seeking fulfillment in the celebrity worship motivates an individual to focus their attention as far as possible on the celebrity and identify with them.
What is ‘addiction’?
The individual increases their ‘dose’ of the celebrity to gain satisfaction. This could lead to more extreme behaviours and delusional thinking.
Explain how likely insecure resistant people are to form parasocial relationships and why.
Most likely to form parasocial relationships. They seek to have needs fulfilled by celebrities that are not being fulfilled by other relationships. They form parasocial relationships because there is no risk of rejection or break up.
Explain how likely insecure avoidant people are to form parasocial and real relationships.
Unlikely, avoid both real and parasocial relationships due to fear of rejection.
Explain the strength of the absorption addiction model being explained by the CAS.
What did McCutcheon also assess about PPTs as well as their level of parasocial relationship?
Compare the amount of anxiety experienced by borderline pathological/intense personal people compared to entertainment social people in their intimate relationships.
What does this suggest about classification of celebrity worship?
McCutcheon used the CAS to measure levels of parasocial relationships. They also assessed PPTs problems in their intimate relationships. PPTs who scored as borderline pathological or intense personal tended to experience high anxiety in their intimate relationships. Entertainment social people generally didn’t. This suggests that celebrity worshippers can be usefully classified into 3 categories and these are predictive actual behaviour.
Explain the strength of the absorption addiction model showing a link between celebrity worship and body image.
What is likely to predispose a person to forming a parasocial relationship?
What were boys and girls aged 14-16 assessed for?
What did researchers find about the correlation between intense personal relationships with a female celebrity and female body image issues? This finding suggests teenage girls are more likely to develop what type of condition?
What prediction does this support?
The absorption-addiction model suggests that a deficiency in a persons life, such as poor body image, would predispose them to forming a parasocial relationship. In one study, boys and girls aged 14-16 were assessed for their level of parasocial relationship. They found that girls with an intense personal parasocial relationship with a female parasocial relationship tended to have poorer body image. They speculate that this may contribute to the development of an eating disorder. This supports the models prediction between poor psychological functioning and intensity of parasocial relationship.
Explain the strength of attachment theory being universal.
Attachment theory can explain why people all over the world can form…
Name the 2 types of culture that researcher compared.
Are insecure or securely attached people most likely to form intense parasocial relationships with TV personalities? Which culture is more likely to do this?
What does this suggest about the relationship between the cause of parasocial relationships and culture?
It explains why people all over the world form parasocial relationships. Researchers compared a collectivist and individualist culture and found that people with an insecure attachment type were most likely to form intense parasocial relationships with TV personalities. This was true for both cultures. This means that the cause of parasocial relationships (attachment type) is independent of culture.
Explain the limitation of McCutcheon’s research being correlational.
What do correlations not show?
Give an example of a conclusion we would not be able to draw about anxiety in personal relationships and borderline pathological involvement.
Explain the impact that 3rd variables can have on correlations.
Why do we need to be careful when drawing conclusions from McCutcheon’s research?
This type of study does not show causal relationships between variables. This means we cannot conclude, for example, that anxiety in personal relationships leads to borderline pathological involvement – the causal relationship could be in the other direction. There could even be a 3rd variable that is the true cause of the correlation. Therefore, we cannot reliably conclude that factors such as anxiety lead to borderline pathological parasocial relationships.
