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When the anthropologist Donald Horton and the sociologist R. Richard Wohl published their essay on parasocial interactions (PSI) and parasocial relationships (PSR), titled "Mass Communication and ParaSocial Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance," in the journal Psychiatry in 1956, they could not have guessed that they had laid the foundation for one of the most popular research fields in media reception and effects research. A year later, in 1957, Wohl died at the age of 36 and, although Horton had published another essay on PSI and PSR with his colleague Anselm Strauss (Horton & Strauss, 1957) just before that, the subject seemed to have died along with Wohl (Hartmann, 2010). Beyond their working group, the subject met with no interest and was forgotten for the next 15 years, left to stagnate like Sleeping Beauty.
Only a change of paradigm in media effects research-or rather, when researchers began to ask "What do people do with the media?" and initiated research on the uses-and-gratifications of the media- led Rosengren and Windahl to bring the neglected concept back to life in their 1972 article "Mass media consumption as a functional alternative" (Rosengren & Windahl, 1972). More specific works emerged over the following decade, peaking with the publication of the Parasocial Interactions (PSI) scale by Rubin, Perse, and Powell in 1985. The scale went on to become the quasistandard in the measurement of parasocial phenomena and its multiple variations and adaptions are still used frequently today. In this article, we use the label parasocial phenomena to summarize all different kinds of parasocial responses of audiences to media characters (e.g., Parasocial Interactions, Parasocial Relationships, Parasocial Break- ups, and so on).
Parasocial phenomena currently constitute some of the most popular and widely researched topics within the field of communication studies (Giles, 2002). By now, not only entertainment researchers but also those investigating advertising effectiveness and journalism incorporate the interactions and relationships between media characters and audience in their studies. Given the enormous number of studies coming from different scientific backgrounds and differing in methodological approaches, researchers face some difficulties in getting an overview on how and to what extent scholars have investigated parasocial phenomena so far. This essay aims to provide such an overview of research practice in this area...