Relational closeness- not parasociality- determines the intensity of grief responses to celebrity death.

This study interrogates the common assumption that parasocial grief, or grief for celebrities, is always less intense than grief for people in social relationships. An online 2 (Parasocial or Social) × 2 (Close or Distant) experiment with participants recruited on MTurk ( = 271) examined differences in people's anticipated grief responses after imagining the hypothetical death of either a celebrity or a person in their social network, who they considered to be either close or a more distant acquaintance. The results revealed that closeness, but unexpectedly not parasociality, affected people's imagined grief. Specifically, for both close others (i.e., parasocial and social friends) and mere acquaintances (i.e., parasocial and social connections who are less familiar), higher levels of closeness were associated with more intense grief. It did not matter whether participants reported on the death of a celebrity or not. These findings provide evidence that parasocial grief is comparable to grief for deaths in social relationships.