Fame

Happy crowd of fans, and a woman taking a selfie with a smiling famous man.

The visibility, status, and prosocial aspects of fame may come with the pressures of competition, status-obsession, and increased stress.

Status is the reputation or position of an individual or group relative to others, such as an individual’s standing in a social group. Prioritizing mental health is a way that we can all help balance stressors related to fame and status.

Adapted from the APA Dictionary of Psychology

Resources from APA

What do we get from celebrity crushes?

Rebecca Tukachinsky Forster, PhD, and Karen Dill-Shackleford, PhD, talk about parasocial relationships and whether they have any of the benefits of real-life friendship

Kicking stigma to the curb

Celebrities publicly attending to their mental health struggles may liberate others to do the same

graphic representation of heads with different thought patterns

Led Zeppelin, ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ and memory

A copyright infringement case about a renowned rock song highlights the importance of considering memory when addressing such disputes decades after a song’s composition

Why popularity matters

Mitch Prinstein, PhD, discusses how social status as teens may follow us for the rest of our lives and how we can raise children and teens differently in a status-obsessed culture