Relational closeness– not parasociality– determines the intensity of grief responses to celebrity death

Abstract

This study interrogates the common assumption that parasocial grief, or grief for celebrities, is always less intense than grief for people in social relationships. An online 2 (Parasocial or Social) × 2 (Close or Distant) experiment with participants recruited on MTurk (N = 271) examined differences in people’s anticipated grief responses after imagining the hypothetical death of either a celebrity or a person in their social network, who they considered to be either close or a more distant acquaintance. The results revealed that closeness, but unexpectedly not parasociality, affected people’s imagined grief. Specifically, for both close others (i.e., parasocial and social friends) and mere acquaintances (i.e., parasocial and social connections who are less familiar), higher levels of closeness were associated with more intense grief. It did not matter whether participants reported on the death of a celebrity or not. These findings provide evidence that parasocial grief is comparable to grief for deaths in social relationships.

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Notes

1 Cohen’s (2003) parasocial breakup scale was included on the survey as an alternative measure of grief. We opted to use the TRIG for the final analyses because it is better suited to capturing responses to both social and parasocial death. However, it is worth noting that the parasocial breakup scale was strongly correlated with the TRIG, r = 0.884**, p <.001.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.