Losing 'Oprah' may lead to lots of lonely ladies
May-25-2011

If you're one of the zillions who is tearful over the thought of life without "The Oprah Winfrey Show," now you have a scientific excuse for your sadness. (You get a scientific excuse! And you get a scientific excuse! And -- OK, that's enough.)
A recent study showed that when a favorite TV show goes off the air -- even temporarily -- its absence can leave the show's most fanatical viewers feeling lonelier. In 'Oprah's' case, we're thinking the rather emotive women featured on the blog Faces of the Last Season of Oprah will be among those having the hardest time dealing with the loss of the show, which ends its 25th and final season on Wednesday.
If you're blue over losing Oprah -- or the characters from shows-gone-by like "Lost" or "Arrested Development" -- that feeling can be explained by a term coined in the 1950s by a pair of psychiatrists: You've developed a "parasocial," or one-sided, relationship with the people that live inside your TV (or inside your computer screen, if Hulu is more your thing).
"We develop these relationships with certain characters -- and it doesn't have to be a fictional character; it could be a TV personality, like Oprah," says Emily Moyer-Guse, an assistant professor of communications at Ohio State University. She's the lead author of the new study, which was published in the journal Mass Communication and Society.

Read the rest of the article right HERE!

Posted by Ken at 1:43 AM - Link to this entry  |  Share this entry  |  Print