Lonely Hearts Find Comfort in TV Characters
LiveScience.com jeremy Hsu
staff Writer
livescience.com Wed Apr 29, 10:24 am ET
Don't feel delusional for turning to favorite television characters on "Lost" or "Brothers and Sisters" for comfort - new research suggests that such illusory relationships can buffer people against loneliness or sadness.
Subjects in one study who felt down from remembering unhappy moments of social rejection soon perked up upon writing about their favorite TV shows and characters. This supports the "social surrogacy hypothesis," where technology provides a sense of social belonging when real social connections are lacking.
"Normally rejection has a horrible effect on us, because we're a very social species," said Shira Gabriel, a psychologist at the University of Buffalo in New York who conducted four studies on the issue. "But with our favorite TV shows, we're no longer sad."
Much of the early research in this realm was based on the self-reports of college students. But taken together, four new studies indicate that even relationships with nonexistent fictional characters can affect people in very real ways.
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