Feeling lonely…watch more TV

 

Loneliness. We’ve all felt it. That feeling when you feel alone but that’s the last thing you actually want to be. Whether it’s a Friday night with nothing to do, weeks of being busy at work that leave little time to socialize, a new breakup, or moving to a new city, feeling lonely is just plain painful. Loneliness is defined as the disturbing experience that occurs when a person feels that his or her network of social relations does not fulfill the person’s needs in important ways. To me, it feels like something is missing in my life. Our basic needs in life are not only food and shelter, but to feel wanted and to want people in our lives in return.

So what happens when we need to fill the void we call loneliness? Some people turn to the bottle while others turn on their TV. If you’re the type to turn on your television when you feel a little lonely you might find yourself getting connected with certain TV shows. My go to TV shows to beat feeling alone are Lost, True Blood, and Grey’s Anatomy. If you’re like me then you can find yourself literally building relationships with the characters on these shows. We get attached to characters like Jack Shepard, Sookie Stackhouse, and McDreamy. Why is this? Why do we get so attached to TV characters? One possible answer that many scholars have studied is called parasocial interaction. You’re probably thinking…parasocial WHAT? Let’s break this term down. According to the dictionary the term “para” means beside or adjacent to, and distinct from, but analogous to. The term social is defined as needing companionship. So now let’s bring those two terms together and what do we get? Distinct from, and needing companionship. To me this is starting to sound like the relationship I have with McDreamy. To elaborate, scholars define parasocial interaction as a one-sided relationship that we create with media figures, and in particular, TV characters. This relationships gets to a level where we come to know these characters as our friends and we see them filling a particular role in our life. So this explains why we turn on the TV when we are feeling a little down in the dumps. 

Three researchers from large Midwestern universities, Qi Wang, Edward, Fink, and Deborah Cai, wanted to know more about the correlation between feeling lonely and turning on our TV’s. To do this they studied four different types of loneliness and the amounts of parasocial interaction that took place with each. They came up with four types of loneliness; family, romantic, and social. I found this part very interesting because I didn’t know that there could be different types of loneliness. The first type of loneliness is family loneliness. Family loneliness is where people feel like they lack family bonds, Wang Fink and Cai thought that family loneliness would definitely lead to higher levels of parasocial interaction. Romantic loneliness occurs when we do not have a romantic partner in our lives, or when our relationship my be unfulfilled which leaves a void in our lives. The researchers wanted to know if romantic loneliness would even be related to parasocial interaction since romantic relationships are more physical and TV cannot fill that void. The third type of loneliness was social, this is where we feel that there is a “perceived discrepancy between desired and obtained social relationships” (p. 94). The researchers thought that people who felt socially lonely would turn on their TV’s to create parasocial interactions to temper loneliness. The final type of loneliness, chronic loneliness, was also measured. Chronic loneliness is where we feel alone all the time and it is something that we cannot shake. It is also part of being depressed. The researchers looked at people who felt all three types of loneliness to get to chronic loneliness.

To find out if Wand, Fink, and Cai were right about their predictions about loneliness and parasocial interaction they tested both men and women with each type of loneliness and the relating levels of parasocial interaction. What they found was that women experiencing family and social loneliness resorted to parasocial interaction more than men did. However, men that felt chronically lonely turned to parasocial interaction more than women did. Romantically lonely people, both men and women, did not turn to parasocial interaction. 

So what do these result mean?

According to the research lonely people do turn to TV to fill a void. So if you’re feeling a little stranded by your friends and family, turning on your TV more often might not be a bad thing. Television can fulfill many functions in our lives. Not only is it always there, waiting to be watched, but it also tells us stories, informs us, and makes us feel connected. If you’re filling that sting that all of us feel when we are newly single or unfulfilled in our relationships you can also turn on the TV but it might not help you feel better. My remedy for being single is to reconnect with your friends and get out of the house. Being a hermit in your house with ice cream and a chick flick might make you feel better in the moment but in the long run it probably won’t. To me, relational loneliness passes. We are single, and it hurts for a while, but as time passes we get over it. To use parasocial interaction to help with loneliness we need to first find out why we are feeling lonely. Once we know that we need to proceed with caution. Parasocial interaction can only help stifle feelings of loneliness. It won’t solve our loneliness.

Want more info? 

Wang, Q., Fink, E.L., & Cai, D.A. (2008). Loneliness, gender and parasocial interaction: A uses and gratifications approach. Communication Quarterly, 56, 87-109.