Most people admire celebrities in some form or another and this tends to be completely harmless and sometimes even beneficial for people. However sometimes this goes further than just admiration and can result in obsession or intense fandom. Celebrity Stalking is one form of this.
Attachment Style, especially in childhood, is said to have a big effect on someone’s likelihood to stalk a celebrity. It has been suggested that the poorer someone’s attachment style was, the more likely they are to stalk someone as they want a relationship with that celeb that cannot cause the rejection they felt in childhood. Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991) proposed a model of adult attachment styles based on your internal working model, one of which, ‘pre-occupied’, is also linked to celebrity stalking. Those with this attachment type have a poor self-image and positive image of others and therefore seek approval from these people.
Tonin conducted a study to support the fact that someone’s likelihood of celebrity staking is affected by their attachment in both childhood and adulthood by measuring both participant’s childhood and adult attachment using two different self-repot measures. She then compared sectioned stalkers, to sectioned non stalkers and a non-sectioned group. She found that the group of stalkers had significantly more evidence of both childhood insecure attachment and insecure adult attachment than in the control groups. This supports the fact that attachment affects someone’s likelihood to stalk a celeb as it shows that insecure attachment is linked to stalking.
This study can be criticised however as the results found were only correlational and therefore cannot show a cause and effect relationship between Celeb worship and individuality. It was also a self-report method which means that demand characteristics could have been apparent in the participants and they could have given answers they thought were socially desirable rather than truthful ones. This means that any conclusions drawn from this study could be based on untruthful evidence.
It has also been claimed that the tendency to engage in stalking could be an indicator of some underlying psychopathology. Maltby (2006) supported this claim by finding that scores on a measure of OCD correlated significantly with both the Borderline-Pathological and Intense-Personal levels of the Absorption Addiction Model measured by the Celebrity Attitude Scale, and also those stalkers often behave irrationally towards their victims in ways that would suggest underlying pathological issues.
No comments:
Post a Comment