Celebrity Worship: Good for Your Health?

Celebrity Worship: Good for Your Health? - TIME:

Using Palinmania as a hook, this article in Time reports on studies by Shira Gabriel, a psychologist at the University of Buffalo, that examine how celebrity worship may affect an admirer's self-esteem. Gabriel found that writing a five-minute essay about their favorite celebrity greatly increased the self-esteem of students who had initially scored low on a standard self-esteem test.

"Because people form bonds in their mind with their favorite celebrities, they are able to assimilate the celebrity's characteristics in themselves and feel better about themselves when they think about that celebrity," says Gabriel. "And that is something these individuals can't do in real relationships because of their fear of rejection keeps them from getting close to people."

But, Gabriel warns, although a little celebrity worship can be beneficial, a lot can become harmful, as cases of obsessed fans and stalkers prove. Admiration of celebrities can become addictive and can prevent people from forming satisfying relationships with real people. And extreme celebrity worship can result in drastically lowered self-esteen in admirers who realize that they can never actually enter the world of the one they admire. This realization often reinforces the admirer's own feelings of inadequacy and isolation.