“Love Makes You Real: Favorite Television Characters Are Perceived As ‘Real’ in a Social Facilitation Paradigm”, 2008-04-01 (; backlinks; similar):
Borrowing from the media, communication, and psychological literatures on parasocial, or one-sided, relationships to media figures, the current investigation examined the processes underlying the anthropomorphism of favorite television characters.
2 studies tested the hypothesis that individuals’ affection for television characters predicts their perceptions of realness.
In Study One, participants reported their perceptions of and feelings toward either their favorite television character or an equally familiar, non-favorite character, and results provided initial support for our hypothesis. In Study 2, participants were passively exposed to an image of either their favorite television characters or a control, non-favorite character while completing well-learned and novel motor tasks. In line with classic social facilitation findings, participants in the “presence of” their favorite character (versus the non-favorite character) demonstrated facilitation on the well-learned task and inhibition on the novel task.
These studies suggest that feelings for the character may play an important role in encouraging the anthropomorphism of television characters.