Relationships - Parasocial Relationships Flashcards
What are para-social relationships?
One-sided relationships in which one member’s heavily invested whilst the other’s limited or no awareness of the other person’s existence.
When are para-social relationships common?
Common with the relationship between celebrities and their fans but can happen in any situation in which interaction’s one-sided.
Who developed the levels of para-social relationships?
The celebrity attitude scale (CAS) was developed by McCutchen to classify the extent of attitudes and behaviours.
What is the entertainment social level?
The fan will only follow the celebrity and aspects of their life closely so they have information they can use to gossip with their friends.
What is the intense personal level?
The fan feels a strong sense of personal connection with the celebrity and may think and talk about them excessively.
What is the borderline pathological level?
The fan over-identifies, feeling the celebrity’s success and failures are their own. Behaviours and fantasies become more intense and uncontrollable, with the fan potentially trying to contact the celebrity of stalk them, expecting their strong feelings to be returned by the celebrity.
What’s the absorption addiction model?
Developed by McCutcheon.
A fans para-social relationships are an attempt to escape the reality of their own lives and make deficits in their real-life relationships, but they can also provide a sense of infidelity.
What’s absorption?
Intense involvement in finding information about the personal life/ career of the celebrity, as an attempt to feel closer to them.
What’s addiction?
Behaviours escalate similar to a drug addiction, becoming more extreme, may result in an attempt to contact/ stalk the celebrity.
What’s the attachment theory explanation?
Based on Bowlby’s theory that attachment problems in childhood result in adult relationships issues due to the development of a defective internal working model.
What are parasocial relationships linked to?
Linked to insecure resistant relationships with mothers, involving inconsistent affection and rejection.
This results in the need to avoid rejection in later life.
Parasocial relationships provide the need for attachment but without the possibility of rejection.
AO3: Research to support absorption addiction model
P: McCutcheon.
E: Asked 330 students to complete Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS) and other tests of emotional wellbeing.
E: Finding higher levels of anxiety when students scored on the two higher subscales as well as problematic real life intimate relationships.
L: Increases validity of absorption addiction model.
AO3: Practical Applications
P: Understanding origins of parasocial relationships, leads to practical applications.
E: e.g. relationship councillors being better able to advise their clients on how to properly prioritise real life relationships.
E: Makes positive impacts in society.
L: Increases validity.
AO3: Self-Report Methods
P: Research is mainly based on self-report methods such as questionnaires and interviews.
E: Prone to social desirability bias.
E: Ppts may lie about relationships to present themselves in best possible light e.g. under-emphasising how intense their feelings are.
L: Reduces internal validity of theory, suggests research may not be useful explanation of parasocial relationships.
