Parasocial Interaction and Identification toward Media Personae and Their Correlation with Pathological Personality Traits among Emerging Adults in USIU - Africa

With expanding internet access, television viewing, cinematic and movie releases, among other entertainment distributions, consumption of media in the 21st century is becoming widespread among the general public, especially young people. It may appear that greater media consumption means that users one way or another connect with favorite characters featured in them. This present study mainly focused on two forms of media engagement among users which are Parasocial Interaction (especially its prolonged derivation termed Parasocial Relationship) and Identification towards both real media personae like celebrities and fictional ones amongst 116 emerging adults, aged between 18 and 25, studying at United States International University – Africa in the Kenyan environment. From a clinical psychological standpoint, this paper attempted to find out the extent to which PSI (particularly the far more enduring PSR) and identification toward a media persona correlated with pathological personality traits. The study used a survey procedure in which a questionnaire included standardized scales such as CPPI to measure PSI/PSR, CPI to measure identification, and PID-5-BF to measure pathological personality traits. To analyze the data, the study tallied the frequency of commonest media personae types while producing mean scores for overall PSI/PSR and identification strengths, overall personality dysfunction and specific pathological personality traits. The study additionally utilized Pearson’s correlation coefficient to find out correlational strengths between PSI/PSR and pathological personality traits then between identification and pathological personality traits. Obtained results showed that most students preferred real life media personae like actors/actresses, news anchors, or rappers. Further results found that students had stronger PSI/PSR than identification towards their favorite media personae. The moderate correlation noticed between PSI/PSR and pathological personality traits, and then identification and  

pathological personality traits might explain how media personae youth admire mold their personality development. Additional analysis showed that gender accounted for the differences in the overall PSI/PSR, identification, and pathological personality traits as well.