A study or paper · 1985 · Research
Loneliness and local television news
A long-running body of work from Rubin and colleagues, repeatedly finding that people form parasocial bonds with news anchors, and that the strongest predictor of which anchor they bond with is not the anchor's performance.
The finding that broke the standard worry. The parasocial relationship is a substitute for interpersonal contact, not a symptom of pathology, and it does not correlate with poor mental health in the way the disorder framing implies. It is closer to a coping strategy that mostly works.
Consideration. The part where somebody stops and thinks. The research, the diagnosis, the ethics, the lawsuits, the regulators. Roughly fifty years of arguing with itself about whether this is a relationship.
Where it sits
1950 1950-1999 · 1985 1999
Provenance · 1 source record(s)
- unverifiedNo specific claim is recorded against this source. The record is a pointer to the work in general; the entry's own prose is the argument and is not sourced line by line.Rubin, A. M., McVoy, S. M., & Brannan, D. (1985). Human Communication Research, 12(2).
Connected · 2 out, 2 in
It sits in