Celebrity Phenomenon Essay

The number of celebrities known by people is greater than before, and despite the lack of physical interaction between the stars and their audiences, the strong emotional connection that audiences feel for the celebrities endures (De Backer, 2012). This emotional connection is what Horton and Wohl (1956; as cited in Theran, Newberg & Gleason, 2010) called as a parasocial interaction, or the one-sided quasi-interaction between an audience and a celebrity. This phenomenon of attachment to media figures is also generally referred to as parasocial relationships wherein there is an experience of real but imaginary interaction with their idol and may have common similarities with actual relationships (Giles & Maltby, 2004). A specific form of parasocial interaction, celebrity worship, has been conceptualized by McCutcheon, Lange and Houran (2002), and it falls into pathological and nonpathological forms.
Celebrity worship ranges from normal admiration to the psychopathological, and is best viewed as a continuum phenomenon (Sansone & Sansone, 2014). To further explain celebrity worship, McCutcheon et al. (2002) proposed the …show more content…
Intense absorption and addiction to these media figures may result to the development of abnormal parasocial relationships (Maltby, Houran & McCutcheon, 2003). One personality profile of celebrity worshippers suggest that people who score high on the CAS tend to show “poorer psychological well-being than non-worshippers” (Maltby, McCutcheon, Ashe, & Houran, 2001).
The present study attempts to identify if Filipino Fandom members’ celebrity attitude is that of worship and if a relationship exists between celebrity attitude and mental health. Moreover, the researchers explored the possibility that the more you worship celebrities, the poorer your mental health