Parasocial relationships

• Parasocial relationships are unreciprocated, one-sided relationships
• Bowlby's attachment theory suggests individuals who didn't form a strong bond with a primary caregiver in early childhood will try and find an attachment substitute as adults, and engaging in parasocial relationships allows them to do so.
• Ainsworth suggested individuals who forms insecure-resistant relationships with their caregiver in early childhood will be more likely to form parasocial relationships as they are too afraid of criticism and rejection from real relationships.
• Insecure-resistant children are clingy to the primary caregiver, showed less explorative behaviour as they didn't feel safe enough to leave their parent and showed great distress when the primary caregiver left the room.
• Hazan and Shaver suggested insecure-resistant behaviour translates into clingy and jealous behaviour in adulthood, making it difficult for people to develop committed and lasting romantic relationships. Intensive celebrity worship allows them to engage in fantast about the perfect relationship, without heartbreak and rejection.
• Weis 1991 identified three key attachment behaviours involved in parasocial relationships: proximity seeking, secure base and protest at disruption.
• Proximity seeking is when the individual will attempt to reduce the distance between themselves and their attachment figure.
• Secure base is the presence of the attachment figure providing a sense of security. There is little to no chance of rejection.
• Protest at disruption is distress following the separation of the attachment figure.
• Giles and Maltby 2006 identified three levels of celebrity worship: entertainment social, intense personal and borderline pathological.
• entertainment social is when fans are attracted to their favourite celebrity and will watch them, keep up to date with them and learn about their celebrity for entertainment purposes.
• intense personal is a deeper level of involvement and reflects intensive and compulsive feelings about the celebrity.
• Borderline pathological is overidentification with the celebrity and uncontrollable behaviours and fantasies about their lives.
• McCutheon 2002 proposed the absorption addiction model which suggested parasocial relationships are an escape from deficiencies such as difficulties forming intimate relationships, having a poor sense of identity, having poor psychological adjustment and a lack of fulfilment in life.
• The absorption addition model suggests parasocial relationships allow an escape from reality to seek fulfilment and add a sense of purpose and excitement.
• The absorption component of the absorption addiction model is when an individual seeks fulfilment in celebrities which motivates them to become preoccupied and identify with them
• The addiction component of the absorption addiction model is addiction which is where an individual needs a more intense involvement to sustain commitment to relationships. this could lead to extreme behaviours such as delusional thinking.
• a personal crisis in someone's life may lead to the need to escape so they move from absorption to addiction. this is negative reinforcement.
• Support for absorption addiction model. The absorption addiction model suggests a deficiency in a person’s life would influence them to form a parasocial relationship. Maltby 2005 assessed 14-16 year olds and found girls would report an intense personal parasocial relationship with a female celebrity whose body shape they admired and found the girls tended to have poor body image. This is positive as it supports the model’s prediction of an association between poor psychological functioning and the level of parasocial relationship.
• Universal. The attachment theory explains why people have a desire to form parasocial relationships universally. Dinkha et al 2015 compared Kuwait to the USA and found people with insecure attachments were more likely to form intense parasocial relationships with TV personalities in both cultures. This supports the view that attachment type may be aa universal explanation for the need to form parasocial relationships.
• However, evidence from McCutheon et al 2006 measured attachment types and celebrity related attitudes in 299 American participants and found attachment type did not affect likelihood of forming a parasocial relationship. This contrasts Dinkha’s findings and shows parasocial relationships are not necessarily a way of compensating for attachment issues.
• Nomothetic. The absorption addiction model attempts to establish universal principles of behaviour and therefore ignores other reasoning for behaviours, oversimplifying complex psychological processes. This is problematic as it would be more beneficial to balance the nomothetic approach with an idiographic approach, looking into particular instances of parasocial relationships and why people develop them.