Orthorexia nervosa is not yet an official diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but clinicians and researchers have grown increasingly attentive to it. Where anorexia nervosa centers on the quantity of food eaten and the pursuit of thinness, orthorexia centers on quality: an obsessive fixation on eating foods perceived as pure, clean, or healthy, often accompanied by escalating dietary restrictions, distress when ideal foods are unavailable, and, in severe cases, malnutrition. Because the condition sits at the intersection of genuine health motivation and disordered eating, researchers have struggled to draw the line between virtuous attention to diet and a clinically significant obsession. Social media has repeatedly been implicated, with earlier studies linking Instagram use to heightened orthorexic symptoms and time spent online to greater risk.

The new study, conducted by Busra Baspinar of the Department of Nutrition and Dietetics at Erzincan Binali Yıldırım University in Türkiye, took a different tack from much of the prior literature. Rather than measuring only how long participants spent on social media, the study asked what they actually viewed, sorting exposure into four content categories: self-optimization and health content, appearance and social comparison content, entertainment content, and informational and hobby content. The sample comprised 2,435 adults, a substantially larger cohort than most previous investigations in this area, which strengthens the statistical footing of the analysis.

Orthorexic tendencies were assessed with the ORTO-11, a shortened Turkish adaptation of the original orthorexia questionnaire developed by Donini and colleagues in 2005 and validated for Turkish speakers by Arusoğlu and coworkers in 2008. Importantly for interpreting the results, lower scores on the ORTO-11 indicate a greater orthorexic tendency, so the negative coefficients reported in the study correspond to stronger orthorexic traits. Using a threshold derived from the sample itself, the study classified 586 participants, roughly one in four, as having an elevated orthorexic tendency. These individuals tended to be older, more likely to be female, and more highly educated than the rest of the sample, although body mass index did not differ between the groups, a detail that helps separate the psychological pattern from simple weight status.

The statistical core of the study was a multivariable linear regression, a technique that allows each content category to be evaluated while holding the others, along with demographic variables, constant. This matters because the four content types are correlated in real life: someone who watches fitness videos also probably encounters appearance-focused posts, and untangling which exposure carries the signal requires simultaneous adjustment. In the fully adjusted model, self-optimization and health content emerged as the strongest correlate, with a standardized beta coefficient of minus 0.45 and a 95 percent confidence interval spanning minus 0.62 to minus 0.28, a highly statistically significant association corresponding to lower ORTO-11 scores and therefore greater orthorexic tendency. Informational and hobby content was also significantly associated with lower scores, with a beta of minus 0.38.

Perhaps the most striking result was what did not predict orthorexic tendencies. Appearance-oriented content and entertainment content, the categories most often blamed in public discourse about social media and body image, were not independently associated with orthorexia after adjustment. This is a genuinely counterintuitive finding. Decades of research have tied appearance-focused social media use to body dissatisfaction and thin-ideal internalization, mechanisms well documented in the eating disorder literature. The present results do not overturn that work, but they do suggest that orthorexia nervosa, with its distinctive focus on health and purity rather than weight, may follow a different pathway, one driven more by healthism and self-optimization narratives than by appearance comparison per se.

The sex-stratified analyses added an important layer of nuance. When the sample was split by sex, the association between self-optimization and health content and orthorexic tendencies was consistent across both groups: a beta of minus 0.45 among males and minus 0.48 among females, both statistically significant, with no significant interaction between sex and content type. This consistency is notable because eating disorders are often assumed to be predominantly female phenomena, and much of the intervention literature targets women. If the content-driven pathway to orthorexic tendencies operates similarly in men, then public health messaging and clinical screening may need to look beyond traditional demographic assumptions.

The study is candid about its limits, and the author’s transparency deserves attention. The effect sizes, measured with Cliff’s delta, ranged from 0.006 to 0.125, which the author characterizes as negligible, and the full regression model explained only about 4 percent of the variance in ORTO-11 scores. In plain terms, social media content type is a real but modest piece of a much larger puzzle. Genetics, personality traits such as perfectionism and obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and broader cultural currents around wellness and moralized eating almost certainly contribute far more. Moreover, the cross-sectional design captures a single moment in time, which means causality cannot be established and reverse causation cannot be excluded. It is entirely plausible that people already preoccupied with healthy eating seek out health-optimization content, rather than the content instilling the preoccupation.

Those caveats notwithstanding, the practical implication flagged in the study’s public significance statement is compelling. Clinicians and public health practitioners, the author argues, may benefit from asking patients not only how much time they spend on social media but what kinds of content they regularly consume. This reframing aligns with a small but growing body of work suggesting that content type can be a more influential factor for orthorexia than duration of use, including a 2025 cross-sectional study published in BMC Public Health that reached a similar conclusion. It also fits within a broader theoretical literature on healthism, the ideology that treats health as a moral obligation and personal project, which scholars have argued provides fertile ground for orthorexic thinking.

As orthorexia nervosa moves closer to formal recognition, with a 2026 concept analysis in Issues in Mental Health Nursing and a systematic review of meta-analytic findings in Current Nutrition Reports reflecting mounting scholarly attention, studies like this one help map the terrain. The picture that emerges is not a simple story of screens poisoning minds, but a more textured one in which the wellness economy’s content, the aspirational, optimization-focused material that promises a better self through cleaner eating and disciplined habits, is modestly but consistently associated with the very obsessions it claims to cure. For the millions of people whose feeds are dominated by fitness influencers and clean-eating tutorials, the message is not that every health video is harmful, but that the line between inspiration and obsession may run through the algorithm, and that researchers are only beginning to trace it.

Subject of Research: Associations between social media content types and orthorexia nervosa tendencies in adults

Article Title: Social media exposure by content type and orthorexia nervosa tendencies: multivariable and sex-stratified analyses in adults

Article References: Baspinar, B. (2026). Social media exposure by content type and orthorexia nervosa tendencies: multivariable and sex-stratified analyses in adults. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1535. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10079-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10079-8

Keywords: orthorexia nervosa, social media, content type, health-optimization content, clean eating, ORTO-11, eating disorders, sex differences, cross-sectional study, healthism, media psychology, public health

The study, conducted by Zhang Hao Goh of the Centre for Information Integrity and the Internet at Nanyang Technological University’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, and Gulizar Haciyakupoglu of the university’s Centre of Excellence for National Security, set out to test whether experiences of online harms moderate the relationship between internet use and informational gratification. Their starting point was a conceptual gap. Uses and gratifications theory, articulated most influentially by Elihu Katz and colleagues in the 1970s, holds that individuals’ social conditions shape how they use media to satisfy needs, and that this use is typically active, adaptive, and conscious. What the framework did not anticipate is a contemporary internet saturated with harms: harassment, scams, misinformation, privacy violations, and the growing catalogue of abuses that researchers now document across platforms.

The authors argue that exposure to such harms may push users into compensatory use, a mode of engagement driven less by curiosity or information-seeking than by a need to escape or offset distress. Compensatory use, in turn, is closely associated with problematic internet use, a pattern of engagement that can undermine the very benefits users hope to derive from being online. In other words, the same hours spent browsing can represent two very different psychological phenomena depending on what the user has endured along the way.

To capture this heterogeneity, the researchers turned to latent profile analysis, a statistical technique that sorts survey respondents into unobserved subgroups based on patterns in their answers. Rather than treating online harm exposure as a simple continuum, the method allowed the team to identify distinct user profiles defined by how frequently respondents encountered online harms. Three profiles emerged from the data: a group with high frequencies of experiencing online harms, a group with average frequencies, and a group with low frequencies. This person-centered approach acknowledges a reality that variable-centered statistics often flatten: the internet experience of a user who is constantly targeted looks qualitatively different from that of one who rarely is, even if their total screen time is identical.

With the three profiles established, the researchers applied multi-group structural equation modeling to examine whether the pathway from social conditions to gratification through internet use operated differently across the groups. The model they tested was a classic uses and gratifications mediation chain: social conditions influence how people use the internet, and that use, in turn, shapes the gratifications they obtain, particularly informational gratification, the sense of being informed and having one’s informational needs met.

The results were strikingly asymmetric. For the average-exposure group, the mediation held exactly as the traditional theory predicts. Internet usage significantly mediated the influence of users’ social conditions on their gratifications, reflecting what the authors describe as moderate, needs-driven use that aligns with the core uses and gratifications framework. For these users, the internet behaves as the theory always assumed it would: a tool that active individuals bend to their purposes, converting their social circumstances into satisfying informational outcomes.

For the high-exposure group, however, the story fell apart. The indirect effect from social conditions through internet use to gratification was statistically insignificant, even though the direct impact of internet use on gratification was the most pronounced of any of the three profiles. That combination is the study’s most intriguing finding. Highly harmed users still derive gratification from their internet use, arguably more intensely than anyone else, but that gratification no longer follows the orderly path the theory describes. The authors interpret this as evidence that under highly adverse online conditions, internet use may become highly needs-driven and compensatory rather than adaptive, active, and conscious. The user is not choosing the internet to meet a need; the user is being driven to it, and the reward that follows is entangled with the distress that preceded it.

This distinction matters because compensatory and adaptive use are not merely different flavors of the same behavior. Research on problematic internet use has repeatedly linked compensatory engagement with poorer well-being outcomes, including loneliness and diminished quality of life. A meta-analytic review of gratification and problematic internet use published in Addictive Behaviors in 2024 underscored the association between gratification-seeking patterns and problematic engagement, and recent work in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions found that problematic users report heightened experiences of both gratification and compensation simultaneously. The Singapore study adds a crucial structural insight to this literature: the very mechanism that makes internet use rewarding for most users may be absent precisely among those who use it most compulsively.

The findings also carry implications for how scholars and policymakers think about digital safety. Online harms have typically been studied as a discrete problem, the domain of cybersecurity researchers, platform trust-and-safety teams, and anti-cyberbullying campaigns. This study suggests that harm exposure is not an add-on to media psychology but a moderator of it, capable of rewiring the fundamental relationship between use and reward. Survey research from the United Kingdom’s Victims’ Commissioner on the impact of online abuse, and work by Stevens and colleagues documenting gender differences in experiences of online harms, have already shown that victimization shapes how comfortable people feel participating online. The new study extends that logic from participation to gratification itself, implying that a user who is chronically harmed may be psychologically cut off from the benefits that justify their time online, even as their usage intensifies.

There are, of course, limits to what a single survey-based study can establish. The design is cross-sectional, so the direction of causality between harm exposure, use, and gratification cannot be definitively pinned down; it is plausible that people who already use the internet heavily for compensatory reasons also place themselves in harm’s way more often. The profiles were derived from self-reported frequencies of harm experiences, which are subject to recall and interpretation biases. And the mediation held only for the average-exposure group, leaving open questions about users at the extremes of both distributions. The authors note that the data supporting the findings are available from the first author upon reasonable request, and the research was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Nanyang Technological University under reference IRB-2023-317.

Even with those caveats, the study lands at a consequential moment. As AI-powered platforms personalize feeds and conversational agents mediate more of the information environment, the uses and gratifications tradition is being asked to explain behaviors its originators never imagined. The theory has proven adaptable before, absorbing considerations of habit, social cognition, and algorithmic curation. What this study proposes is perhaps its most demanding update yet: that any account of why people use the internet, and what they get from it, must reckon with what the internet does to them. For the majority of users who experience harms at moderate rates, the internet remains what the theory promised, a responsive instrument of need satisfaction. For those who live with frequent online harms, the instrument may be playing a different tune entirely, one driven by compensation rather than choice, and one that the next generation of media theory will need to name, measure, and address.

Subject of Research: How experiences of online harms moderate the relationship between internet use and informational gratification within uses and gratifications theory

Article Title: Do experiences of online harms moderate the relationship between Internet use and informational gratification? insights from the Uses and Gratifications perspective

Article References: Goh, Z. H., & Haciyakupoglu, G. (2026). Do experiences of online harms moderate the relationship between Internet use and informational gratification? insights from the Uses and Gratifications perspective. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1568. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10043-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10043-6

Keywords: uses and gratifications theory, online harms, internet use, informational gratification, latent profile analysis, structural equation modeling, problematic internet use, compensatory internet use, cyberpsychology, media psychology, digital safety, survey research

The study was led by Fatma Dinç of Bartın University, together with colleagues at Recep Tayyip Erdogan University, the University of Health Sciences in Ankara, Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom, and Dokuz Eylul University. Between September 4 and December 27, 2024, the team surveyed 911 volunteer students aged 13 to 18 in six high schools in the Western Black Sea Region of Türkiye. Just over half of the participants, 54.12 percent, were female, and the average age was 15.43 years. All data were self-reported, collected through validated questionnaires administered in the school setting.

Three instruments formed the backbone of the measurement. Problematic social media use was assessed with the Social Media Addiction Scale for Adolescents, a Turkish instrument designed to capture the compulsive, loss-of-control patterns that distinguish addiction-like use from ordinary high engagement. Depressive symptoms were screened with the Kutcher Adolescent Depression Scale, a brief clinical tool developed specifically for adolescent populations and previously validated against longer depression inventories. Body image was measured with the Body Image Scale, which taps how positively or negatively young people evaluate their own physical appearance. Participants also provided demographic details, including how much time they spent on social media each day.

The analytical strategy was a cross-sectional indirect-effects model, a form of mediation analysis that asks whether the statistical association between two variables flows through a third. The researchers first adjusted their models for gender, age, and daily social media use, three factors that could otherwise masquerade as psychological effects. After these adjustments, the core pattern held firm. Problematic social media use was positively associated with depression and with a more negative body image, and a more negative body image was itself associated with higher depression scores. Each link in the chain was statistically reliable on its own.

The headline result concerns the indirect pathway. The estimated indirect association between problematic social media use and depression through body image was B = 0.0363, with a 95 percent bootstrap confidence interval of 0.0229 to 0.0518 and a p value below .001. In plain language, when the researchers computed the product of the two constituent paths, the confidence interval excluded zero, meaning the mediated association was unlikely to be a fluke of sampling. Bootstrap confidence intervals, which resample the data thousands of times, are the standard tool for testing indirect effects because such products rarely follow the tidy normal distributions assumed by simpler tests.

Recognizing that a single mediation model can be fragile, the team also ran a reverse-order sensitivity analysis, treating the variables in the opposite causal arrangement. The indirect association remained significant in that configuration as well, with an estimate of B = 0.0905 and a 95 percent bootstrap confidence interval of 0.0558 to 0.1310. The fact that the pattern survived this stress test suggests the findings are not an artifact of one particular modeling choice, though it cannot settle the deeper question of causal direction, which the authors are careful to flag.

That caveat matters enormously. Because every participant was surveyed at a single point in time, the study cannot determine whether problematic social media use drives negative body image and depression, whether depressed and body-dissatisfied adolescents retreat into compulsive scrolling, or whether all three phenomena feed one another in a loop. Methodologists have warned for years that cross-sectional mediation can bias estimates of longitudinal processes, sometimes substantially, and the authors explicitly state that the cross-sectional design is unable to determine the temporal direction of the relationships. What the study delivers is a map of associations, not a demonstration of cause.

Even so, the map fits a broader theoretical landscape. Social learning and social comparison accounts of media effects propose that adolescents calibrate their self-evaluations against the curated, filtered, and often digitally manipulated bodies they encounter online. Experimental work has shown that exposure to edited Instagram images can shift body satisfaction in adolescent girls within a single session, and appearance-based social comparison has been repeatedly linked to body dissatisfaction in both boys and girls. Developmental researchers describe adolescence as a perfect storm for these effects: a period when identity is under construction, peer approval carries enormous weight, and the brain regions supporting self-concept are still maturing. A platform architecture that quantifies approval in likes and followers gives that storm a constant, measurable feed.

The depression side of the pathway is equally well documented. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses have linked both screen time and addiction-like social media use to elevated depressive symptoms in young people, with some dose-response evidence suggesting risk rises as use becomes heavier and more compulsive. Longitudinal studies have found that body dissatisfaction predicts the onset of depressive symptoms in both adolescent girls and boys, and that problematic social media use can foreshadow later depression, partly through disruptions to sleep and other restorative routines. The new study’s contribution is to knit these strands together in a single adolescent sample, showing that body image statistically carries a meaningful share of the association between the two.

For clinicians, educators, and parents, the practical implication is that interventions targeting body image may do double duty. School-based programs that teach media literacy, including the ability to recognize retouched images and algorithmically amplified appearance ideals, have shown promise in reducing body dissatisfaction. Cognitive behavioral and interpersonal approaches have evidence for preventing depression in adolescents, and combining them with appearance-focused digital literacy could address the pathway this study highlights. Screening for problematic social media use in pediatric and school nursing settings, the professional home of several of the study’s authors, may also help identify young people at risk before the loop tightens. What remains to be established, through longitudinal and experimental designs, is whether breaking the body-image link actually weakens the connection between compulsive scrolling and low mood. Until then, the study stands as a carefully quantified warning that what teenagers see in their feeds may shape how they see themselves, and how they see themselves may shape how they feel.

Subject of Research: The association between problematic social media use, body image, and depression in adolescents

Article Title: Associations among problematic social media use, body image, and depression among adolescents: a cross-sectional indirect-effects analysis

Article References: Dinç, F., Çelik, İ., Bayrak Aykan, E., Griffiths, M. D., & Bektaş, M. (2026). Associations among problematic social media use, body image, and depression among adolescents: a cross-sectional indirect-effects analysis. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1570. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10134-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10134-4

Keywords: adolescents, problematic social media use, social media addiction, body image, depression, mediation analysis, mental health, social comparison, media psychology, cross-sectional study, Türkiye, Current Psychology

The study was conducted by Daniela Zibenberg of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and Jean Carlos Natividade of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Campinas. They recruited 646 Brazilian adults aged 18 and older, with a mean age of 29.6 years, through invitations distributed on social media platforms including TikTok, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Just under 73 percent of participants were women, and roughly 60 percent were in a romantic relationship at the time of the study, most of them dating or married. The research was approved by the ethics committee of the Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

To capture the psychological footprint of romantic comedies, the researchers measured several distinct constructs. Participants ranked their preference for 14 film genres, reported how often they watched romantic comedies on a scale from never to always, and estimated how many romantic comedy films they watched in a typical week. Romantic beliefs were assessed with a Brazilian adaptation of the well-established Romantic Beliefs Scale, which measures four idealized notions: that love finds a way despite obstacles, that there is one and only one true love, that true love will be nearly perfect, and that love can strike at first sight. Relationship satisfaction was measured with a validated five-item scale, and personality was assessed with both the Big Five model and the Emotional Investment construct, which captures the disposition to invest in an amorous relationship through its Romanticism and Affection components.

The theoretical backdrop for the study draws on two of the most influential frameworks in media psychology. Social learning theory, originally formulated by Albert Bandura, holds that people learn behaviors and attitudes by observing others, including fictional characters on screen. Cultivation theory, developed by George Gerbner and colleagues, proposes that heavy media consumers gradually come to perceive the world as resembling the world depicted in the media they consume. Applied to romantic comedies, both frameworks predict that repeated exposure to idealized romantic expressions, such as love at first sight and destined soul mates, should lead viewers to endorse those same beliefs more strongly in their own lives.

The correlational results supported that prediction. Weekly romantic comedy consumption was positively correlated with all four romantic belief factors as well as with an overall romantic belief score. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses, which tested five separate models, revealed that demographic and personality characteristics together explained between 13 percent and 23 percent of the variance in romantic beliefs, with the strongest prediction observed for the overall romantic belief factor. Adding the romantic comedy variables of frequency, weekly quantity, and genre preference increased the explained variance by an additional 2 to 4 percent across the models. Notably, the Romanticism component of Emotional Investment emerged as the single most powerful predictor in every model tested, suggesting that a person’s underlying romantic disposition is tightly interwoven with their idealized beliefs about love.

The specific predictors showed instructive patterns. Conscientiousness and Romanticism positively predicted all four belief factors, while Affection behaved counterintuitively, showing negative associations with several beliefs once other variables were accounted for. Age negatively predicted belief in the one and only true love but positively predicted idealization, a pattern the authors speculate may reflect generational differences or the accumulated relationship experience of older participants. Gender also mattered, with men endorsing more romantic beliefs than women on average. Among the romantic comedy measures, the number of romantic comedy films watched per week was the most consistent predictor, positively forecasting idealization, love at first sight, love finds a way, and the overall romantic belief score, while genre preference predicted the love finds a way factor and the overall score.

Perhaps the most intriguing finding emerged from the mediation analysis examining how romantic comedy consumption relates to relationship satisfaction. The researchers found what statisticians call inconsistent mediation, or a suppression effect. At the direct level, weekly romantic comedy consumption was negatively associated with relationship satisfaction, a pattern the authors attribute to the upward social comparisons viewers may make between their own relationships and the polished, idealized romances on screen, which often depict consistently satisfying intimacy, mind-reading partners, and frequent romantic gestures. Yet two indirect pathways ran in the opposite direction and were statistically significant: through the belief in one and only true love, and through the idealization belief, romantic comedy consumption was positively associated with relationship satisfaction. These positive indirect effects partially offset the negative direct effect, producing a total effect that was not significantly different from zero.

This double-edged pattern helps resolve a long-standing debate in the literature. Previous studies have reported that romantic media fosters unrealistic expectations that undermine satisfaction, that it reinforces positive beliefs that enhance relationships, and that it has no measurable association with satisfaction at all. The new findings reconcile these contradictions by showing that all three outcomes can coexist within a single pathway structure, with the balance determined by which beliefs a viewer internalizes. Importantly, the researchers found that idealized romantic beliefs themselves were positively correlated with relationship satisfaction, consistent with earlier work suggesting that romanticism can promote relationship-maintenance behaviors rather than undermining them. The love at first sight factor, by contrast, was not significantly correlated with satisfaction, possibly because initial physical attraction is largely unrelated to the passion, intimacy, and commitment that sustain long-term partnerships.

The authors are careful to acknowledge the limitations of their design. The study was cross-sectional, so it cannot determine whether romantic comedies shape beliefs, whether people with romantic beliefs seek out romantic comedies to confirm their existing worldview, or whether both processes operate simultaneously. Only about 3.4 percent of the sample reported watching three or more romantic comedies per week, so stronger cultivation effects might emerge among heavier viewers. All measures relied on self-report, which is vulnerable to recall bias, and the sample was predominantly female, highly educated, and skewed toward participants with incomplete college education. The researchers also note that Brazilian media consumption is shaped by a heavy reliance on foreign streaming content and by the enduring popularity of daily soap operas, both of which may dilute or complicate the identification processes assumed by social learning theory. Future work, they argue, should include longitudinal designs, more gender-balanced and ethnically representative samples, and experimental procedures that track belief changes over weeks with and without romantic comedy exposure.

The practical implications reach from the therapy room to the writers’ room. The authors suggest that relationship education programs could harness romantic comedies that reinforce beneficial beliefs, and they cite prior evidence that simple interventions, such as reading a corrective article before viewing or completing a counterarguing exercise afterward, can reduce romantic belief endorsement when desired. Clinicians working from evidence-based frameworks may find the results useful when discussing media habits with clients, particularly given research linking belief formation to emotional well-being. For filmmakers, the recommendation is subtle: rather than merely portraying idealized relationships, producers might craft narratives that promote the specific idealized beliefs, such as love finding a way or the value of a singular partner, that are associated with greater satisfaction. And for the millions of viewers who return each year to the comforting formula of the meet-cute and the happy ending, the message is reassuring. Romantic comedies do leave a mark on how we think about love, but that mark is modest, filtered through who we already are, and it does not appear to make our relationships any less happy.

Subject of Research: The impact of romantic comedy exposure on idealized romantic beliefs and relationship satisfaction in Brazilian adults

Article Title: Happily Ever After: Impact of Romantic Comedy Exposure on Romantic Beliefs

Article References: Zibenberg, D., & Natividade, J. C. (2026). Happily Ever After: Impact of Romantic Comedy Exposure on Romantic Beliefs. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00526-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00526-7

Keywords: romantic comedies, romantic beliefs, relationship satisfaction, personality traits, cultivation theory, social learning theory, media psychology, Big Five, emotional investment, idealization, Brazilian adults, film consumption