A collection of studies released by two universities suggests people coping with loneliness might find themselves watching more television to fulfill their social needs.
Psychologists at the University at Buffalo and Miami University in Ohio published their findings in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, indicating that television can provide people with the impression that their social needs are being met with the illusionary relationships made with their favorite TV characters and/or personalities.
Lisa Frey, director of the OU Counseling Psychology Clinic, said while she is unsure how common this form of coping is, there are students who cling to TV and other technologies in times of depression.
“More times we have people come in that say they are using those things to avoid social interaction or to get their mind off of it,” Frey said, “or because they have had some bad experiences so maybe they aren’t confident in their ability to have social interaction or to socialize.”
The first survey of 701 undergraduate students had students arrange 31 activities by how likely they would use each activity to cope with loneliness. Watching a favorite program ranked second behind listening to music.
The second study surveyed 102 undergraduate students by having the subjects write essays over several television programs. Subjects who found their social needs met wrote longer in their descriptions of their favorite programs than they did in their descriptions of other programs.
One hundred and sixteen undergraduates participated in study three, which showed having a favorite program on a person’s mind reduced negative moods, low self-esteem and feelings of rejection.
The final study had 222 undergraduates write an essay in 10 minutes about their favorite program. After completing the essay, the participants expressed less feelings of loneliness or social alienation than they had in control experiments.
Frey said television is not the only thing that students sometimes use as substitutes for a social life. Other technologies, like the Internet, video games or a mix of the three, seem to take the same role as television does in the studies.
“The problem with using technology to meet those [social] needs is we don’t get anything back,” Frey said. “You may have the illusion you’re getting something back but you really aren’t. You aren’t getting to know somebody better or developing a friendship with somebody else.”
The Oklahoma Daily is pleased to provide you the opportunity to share your thoughts about this article. We encourage lively debate on the issues of the day, but we ask you refrain from using profanity or other offensive speech, engaging in personal attacks or name-calling, posting advertising, or straying from the topic at hand. To comment, you must be a registered user of OUDaily.com. Thanks for taking the time to offer your thoughts.
You must be logged in to leave a comment. Log in | Register
EN 3 years ago
how dare you insinuate that this is an illusory dream? pam will be mine...charles saw right through jim
JJanowiak 3 years ago
But there is a caveat that it does depend on what you're watching. Nobody would pooh-pooh on a lonely person turning to literature for social fulfillment even though they "don't get anything back", so clearly the content of what you're consuming changes how other people perceive you as the recipient. For instance, if I was lonely but I watched C-SPAN, Bill Moyers, and The Wire for my social needs, I would definitely be getting something out of it, something very important: knowledge. A show like The Wire takes you back to some of the basic reasons people are interested in literature at all: they are complex but I would say one simplistic answer is to get a better understanding of how the world works.
For a lot of lonely people this isn't the case, though. People I see who look outwardly look lonely (admittedly something subjective) seem to more often pull out Twilight or some other kind of trash, books that really do artificially replace social interaction without giving you something valuable in return. Ditto with most TV, but in both mediums (as in all media, really) you can't just typecast everything as the same.
One aspect of this study not addressed in the article (although well-documented elsewhere) is the way that "impersonal" media like literature, film, and TV have the effect of projecting their content onto us emotionally even though the content is fictional. Nothing wrong with it, you just have to maintain a self-awareness about you while you consume it.
kdbp1213 3 years ago
do we really need an academic study to tell us what we already know?