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.
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