Gayle S. Stever

Verified

Gayle verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Gayle verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• Ph.D. in Lifespan Development from Arizona State University
• Professor at Empire State University

This article delineates the distinctions between mediated and parasocial relationships before outlining the key aspects of parasocial theory and suggesting that the theory be expanded to consistently include parasocial attachment as a category distinct from parasocial relationships. Parasocial theory involves interactions, relationships and attachm...

There is no doubt that media is a powerful force in the 2020s. On the political scene it exposes the divide between right and left, conservative and liberal, and among various political parties. In the financial world, it informs, persuades, and promotes. It influences religion, family, entertainment...there is little that remains untouched by medi...

Audience research has entered a new era in the twenty-first century such that the demarcation between producer and consumer is no longer as clear as it once might have been. As a result, audience studies continually negotiate the nature of the roles of those who produce media and those who are media users. This chapter describes the continued salie...

This book covers key aspects of parasocial relationships (PSRs), or the relationships people have with media personalities, including fictional characters. The principal feature of a PSR is that it is not individually reciprocated although when the parasocial object is a real person, usually a celebrity, that celebrity often has a reciprocal relati...

From its launch in 2016, Cameo continues to be a newer social media service that offers personalized videos from over 50,000 celebrities for a variable schedule of fees as set by the individual celebrities. This study offers descriptive statistics regarding a stratified sample of selected Cameo videos in order to familiarize scholars with how Cameo...

Various issues in measurement of concepts related to audience research, e.g. parasocial theory, identification, and related concepts.

Many media users feel as if they are engaging in an interaction or have a personal relationship with people they see in the media. These phenomena are collectively referred to as parasocial experiences (PSEs). This handbook offers a thorough synthesis of the fast-growing, international, and multidisciplinary research of PSEs, not only celebrating t...

We propose a model of Vicarious Social Connection to organize the field of study commonly known as parasocial research. Whereas the study of parasocial or one-sided relationships is among the most common approaches in the field, audience connections with media figures (e.g., fictional characters, media personalities) may be construed in a variety o...

Over the course of the lifespan, Erik Erikson described various stages in development that each had a developmental task or crisis. This chapter focuses on the development of parasocial engagement as it occurs specifically at each stage beginning in early childhood and extending through to later adulthood. How parasocial connections facilitate move...

Evolutionary theory as it relates to media psychology is often controversial (Grabe, 2011). A fundamental tenet relating the two fields posits that because our species has not had time, in an evolutionary sense, to adapt to media, we process mediated stimuli as if it were real (Reeves and Nass, 1996). So much violence is consumed through media that...

Abstract-This article describes the methods and materials used in my various studies of fan cultures in the years from 1988 to 2018. It delineates a mixed methods/multiperspectivist approach and describes the process by which fan groups were selected and studied. Contrary to the concept of the acafan, in which academics study a fan group of which t...

Social and Behavioral Sciences mentor Gayle Stever was the recipient of the Susan H. Turben Award for Excellence in Scholarship in 2017, and delivered the following edited lecture at the Fall Academic Conference the same year. This article is in All About Mentoring, Issue #52, a publication of Empire State College/SUNY. It was reviewed by peers wi...

In most writings about celebrity, the word is used as a noun. A person is a celebrity. But what if we thought of celebrity, not as a noun, but rather as a characteristic of an individual? We could then talk about celebrity in the same way as an individual’s other characteristics. There is a common thread in personality research that tries to differ...

The manuscript proposes a theoretical model of the development of parasocial relationships (PSRs) building on Knapp’s model of relationship development. Through synthesis of research across disciplines, the model conceptualizes the relational goals and parasocial interactions (PSIs) specific to the PSR. The model identifies variables that predict e...

Available for preorder on Amazon

A table describing the characteristics of each PSR relational stage and items from existing scales that capture each stage. This is an online Appendix for the manuscript "Theorizing Development of Parasocial Engagement".

A table describing the characteristics of each PSR relational stage and items from existing scales that capture each stage. This is an online Appendix for the manuscript: Tukachinsky, R. & Stever, G. (forthcoming). Theorizing development of parasocial engagement.

The manuscript proposes an overarching theoretical model of parasocial experiences including parasocial interactions (PSIs), relationships (PSRs) and attachment (PSA). Building on Knapp's model of relationship development, the model describes stages of media consumers' development of PSRs with media figures from initiation (i.e., first encounter wi...

This is the Powerpoint presentation for our ICA2018 paper for the Prague convention

The United Nations’ sustainable development goals cover a broad range of global problems and reaching those goals will require effort and education. Lifelong learning has become an essential part of modern life with rapidly changing technology, globalization, and increased urbanization, as well as environmental changes and the rise of green careers...

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals cover a broad range of global problems and reaching those goals will require effort and education. Lifelong learning has become an essential part of modern life with rapidly changing technology, globalization, and increased urbanization, as well as environmental changes and the rise of green careers...

Parasocial interaction (PSI) describes nonreciprocated audience interactions with media personae. These interactions are, in many ways, like face-to-face interactions with the caveat that the response normally expected from a social partner is missing. Parasocial theory describes and attempts to explain imagined social relationships and interaction...

Media has had an enormous impact on how gender and gender roles are perceived culturally. Media is generally understood to be a form of communication that is less direct than face-to-face communication, including a number of different media forms that influence and have been influenced by gender roles. These include, but are not limited to, televis...

In a participant-observer ethnographic study, the researcher offers evidence from 10 years of observation of the Josh Groban fandom as an example of fans becoming friendly acquaintances of celebrities. Contrary to the way much of the psychological literature depicts fans as celebrity worshippers or stalkers, the largest percentage of the fans obser...

Forming attachments to those people proximal to the individual was the only option prior to mass media. In an era of mass media, individuals become acquainted with media personae, expanding greatly the pool of available attachment objects. This increases the possibility of a parasocial attachment, defined as a nonreciprocated attachment to a famili...

This article addresses the presence of social media in our culture and the significance of interaction that takes place through social media. Specifically this research calls for a description of social interaction between/among a sample of celebrities and their fans on Twitter. It is a given that fans normally don't have access to regular social i...

Twitter is a relatively new social media website and a good option for celebrities who want to chat with their fans without having to give away personal access information. This paper presents an analysis of a sample of the Twitter accounts of 12 entertainment media celebrities, 6 males and 6 females, all taken from 2009-2012 Twitter feeds. Since l...

This paper proposed an integrated theory of the parasocial, drawing from both communications studies and social sciences in order to describe three levels of the parasocial: parasocial interaction, parasocial relationships, and parasocial attachment. It then linked parasocial attachment to classical attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969; Ainsworth, 1978)...

McCutcheon, Lange, & Houran (2002) proposed the Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS) to identify celebrity worshipers, useful for identifying individuals who are overly absorbed or addicted to their interest in a celebrity. Problematic is the absence of a conceptual definition for celebrity worshiper and how this term relates to use of the term fan. Curr...

The theories of Levinson (1986 Am Psychol 41(1):3–13) and Erikson (1959 Identity and the life cycle. WW Norton and Co, New York, 1968 Youth and crisis. WW Norton and Co, New York), Bandura’s (1986 Social foundations of thought and action: a social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs) Social Cognitive Theory, and the ethological attach...

Data from previous studies compared two celebrity fan communities and their superstar honorees. This comparison included the nature of the fan-celebrity interaction, the nature of fans’ interactions with each other, and motivations fans reported for their participation in the fandom of the target celebrity. A structured, focused, and largely qualit...

Many individuals look for a community of like-minded people with whom to form connections. For some, the media fan community becomes this social network. Contrary to the popular media and some research literature that depicts fan/celebrity interaction as obsessive on the part of the fan and a potential nuisance to the celebrity, studied fan subcult...

This study developed a system of celebrity fan classification that addresses issues raised in the literature with regard to motivations for becoming a fan, and levels of intensity for fans, recognizing a dichotomy of interactive vs. isolated fans. There is a need to differentiate the fan suffering from pathologies from fans who are healthy and who...

The Celebrity Appeal Questionnaire was constructed to operationalize constructs related to why fans are attracted to their favorite celebrities and was developed for use with fan bases for specific celebrities. This revised version asked fans of a specific celebrity to rank order three roles they might see the target celebrity playing in society wi...

Data collected on 97 members of the Star Trek fan subculture showed that previous trends for other fan subcultures persisted, with introverts and intuitives significantly over-represented. Gender differences suggested the presence of two fan subcultures, an INT male subculture and an INF female subculture. A discussion comparing and contrasting roc...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Arizona State University, 1994. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [119]-122). Photocopy.

he Celebrity Appeal Questionnaire was constructed to operationalize constructs related to parasocial attraction or attraction to celebrities by their fans. The article contains a factor analysis of responses on this questionnaire by 81 college students and a group of 367 Michael Jackson concert attendees. Components of parasocial attraction were pe...

This paper details the analysis of participant personalities correlated with the perceived personality of the chosen superstar using the MBTI. Significant deviations from a normative sample were found for a sample of 98 Michael Jackson fans. Jackson was seen as an INFJ by fans who filled out the MBTI as they imagined he would. Compared to Myers' hi...