Jonathan Cohen

TL;DR: The authors argue that although the notion of identification with media characters is widely discussed in media research, it has not been carefully conceptualized or rigorously tested in empirical audience studies and suggest that a useful distinction can be made between identification and other types of reactions that media audiences have to media characters.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that the valence of information about the hero affected the level of identification and the time of deeds of a character in a movie, but not the identification.

TL;DR: Despite its growing prominence in news coverage and public discourse, there is still considerable ambiguity regarding when and how fact-checking affects beliefs as mentioned in this paper, which may be explained by theories of motivated r...

TL;DR: This article examined the responses of television viewers to the potential loss of their favorite television characters and found that viewers expecting to lose their favorite characters anticipate negative reactions similar to those experienced after the dissolution of social relationships.

TL;DR: The essence of entertainment television is that it can delight and enlighten “through the exhibition of the fortunes and misfortunes of others... ” (Zillmann & Bryant, 2002, p. 437).