Mental Health
Evidence indicates that poor mental health is correlated with celebrity worship. Researchers have examined the relationship between celebrity worship and mental health in United Kingdom adult samples. One study found evidence to suggest that the intense-personal celebrity worship dimension was related to higher levels of depression and anxiety. Similarly, another study in 2004, found that the intense-personal celebrity worship dimension was not only related to higher levels of depression and anxiety, but also higher levels of stress, negative affect, and reports of illness. Both these studies showed no evidence for a significant relationship between either the entertainment-social or the borderline-pathological dimensions of celebrity worship and mental health.
Another correlated pathology examined the role of celebrity interest in shaping body image cognitions. Among three separate UK samples (adolescents, students and older adults) individuals selected a celebrity of their own sex whose body/figure they liked and admired, and then completed the Celebrity Attitude Scale along with two measures of body image. Significant relationships were found between attitudes toward celebrities and body image among female adolescents only.
The findings suggested that, in female adolescence, there is an interaction between intense-personal celebrity worship and body image between the ages of 14 and 16, and some tentative evidence suggest that this relationship disappears at the onset of adulthood,which is between the ages of 17 and 20. These results are consistent with the authors who stress the importance of the formation of relationships with media figures, and suggest that relationships with celebrities perceived as having a good body shape may lead to a poor body image in female adolescents.
Within a clinical context the effect of celebrity might be more extreme, particularly when considering extreme aspects of celebrity worship. Relationships between the three classification of celebrity worship (entertainment-social, intense-personal and borderline-pathological celebrity worship and obsessiveness), ego-identity, fantasy proneness and dissociation were examined. Two of these variables drew particular attention: fantasy proneness and dissociation. Fantasy proneness involves fantasizing for a duration of time, reporting hallucinatory intensities as real, reporting vivid childhood memories, having intense religious and paranormal experiences. Dissociation is the lack of a normal integration of experiences, feelings, and thoughts in everyday consciousness and memory, in addition, it is related to a number of psychiatric problems.
Though low levels of celebrity worship (entertainment-social) are not associated with any clinical measures, medium levels of celebrity worship (intense-personal) are related to fantasy proneness (approximately 10% of the shared variance), while high levels of celebrity worship (borderline-pathological) share a greater association with fantasy proneness (around 14% of the shared variance) and dissociation (around 3% of the shared variance, though the effect size of this is small and most probably due to the large sample size). This finding suggests that as celebrity worship becomes more intense, and the individual perceives having a relationship with the celebrity, the more the individual is prone to fantasies.
"Celebrity worship" is a term coined by Lynn E. McCutcheon (DeVry University), Diane D. Ashe (Valencia Community College), James Houran (Southern Illinois University) and a few further collaborators in a series of articles published primarily in the North American Journal of Psychology and a non-peer reviewed working paper series called Current Issues in Social Psychology, the Journal of Psychology and British Journal of Psychology.
A number of historical (Barbas 2001; Hansen 1991), ethnographic (i.e. Henry & Caldwell 2007; Jenkins 1992; Kozinets 2001; O'Guinn 1991; Richardson & Turley 2006; Stacey 1994); netnographic (i.e. Kozinets 1997) and auto-ethnographic studies (i.e. Holbrook 1987, 1995; Wohlfeil and Whelan 2008) in diverse academic disciplines such as film studies, media studies, cultural studies and consumer research, which - unlike McCutcheon et al. focused mainly on a student sample (with two exceptions) - have actually studied real fans in the field, have come to very different conclusions that are more in line with Horton & Wohl's (1956) original concept of parasocial interaction or an earlier study by Leets et al. (1995).
Read more about this topic: Celebrity Worship Syndrome
Famous quotes related to mental health:
“A major misunderstanding of child rearing has been the idea that meeting a child’s needs is an end in itself, for the purpose of the child’s mental health. Mothers have not understood that this is but one step in social development, the goal of which is to help a child begin to consider others. As a result, they often have not considered their children but have instead allowed their children’s reality to take precedence, out of a fear of damaging them emotionally.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysands to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defence. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)