Feeling Better...But Also Less Lonely? An Experimental Comparison of How Parasocial and Social Relationships Affect People’s Well-Being

For several decades, scholars have wondered if lonely individuals might benefit from emotional connections to media characters (i.e. parasocial relationships) to alleviate their solitude. Although some research has challenged this assumption, recent evidence suggests that people's ties to media characters might indeed fulfil currently unsatisfied needs for social companionship. Moreover, it has been argued that parasocial compensation effects may reach beyond the mere reduction of loneliness, encompassing other socially relevant well-being benefits as well. To make sense of the on-going debate—and to gain a more nuanced understanding of how parasocial relationships affect media users' well-being—we conducted an online experiment, asking participants (N = 151) to contemplate a real-life friendship, a parasocial friendship, or a nonsocial topic for several minutes. Before and after this task, three well-being indicators were measured. Our results show that the mental activation of parasocial relationships significantly improved participants' mood, to a similar extent as thinking about real-life friendships did. Regarding immediate feelings of loneliness, however, participants' ruminations about parasocial relationships proved ineffective.