Relationship Among Self-personality,Personality Perception And Preference Of Fictional Characters

Perceiving others’ personality directly influences social behaviors of individuals,making it a valuable research topic in social psychology.Personality is one of the most fundamental individual traits and foundations of human behavior.It has considerable effects upon social interactions.Personality perception on other peoples may be affected by people’s own personality,which is called "perceiver effects".Perceiver effects are indicated to be highly stable and influenced by various factors.In the context of fictional characters,preference may be influential to perceiver effects.Apart from that,personality is found to be related with preference towards preferences of different behaviors and things involving fictional characters,showing that personality may influence preference towards fictional characters.During the appreciation of artworks such as movies or novels,viewers will experience extensive emotional and cognitive involvement with fictional characters.The features of connections between viewers and characters as well as the factors influencing connections possess high specificity,indicating individual factors play an essential role in the connections between viewers and fictional characters.Individual features influence not only perceptions of characters but also intensity of preference towards them.Relationships between fans and fictional characters are characterized as “parasocial relationships”,which is a one-way illusional sense of connection with media figures.People in a parasocial relationship can perceive imaginary interactions with figures,while it shares abundant features with real social relationships.In summary,research about relationships between self-personality and personality perceptions and preferences of fictional characters not only possesses theoretical value as a complement of personality research,but also practical value as a reference for fictional creative industry.We presents two experiments to examine the hypotheses.In experiment 1,we choose fans of “Touhou Project” as target.and examined whether perceiver effects towards fictional characters exist and possible influences from preference.Results suggest that significant perceiver effects exist in Extraversion,Agreeableness,Conscientiousness and Neuroticism,which only appears on fans’ preferred characters.Additionally,significant mediator effect of intensity of preference,characterized as intensity of parasocial relationship,on perceiver effects of Conscientiousness,and significant moderator effect on perceiver effects of Agreeableness are detected.This study also suggests that fans with high scores on certain personality traits will prefer characters with higher traits on the same personality dimension.The effects is significant on Agreeableness,and marginal significant on Extroversion.In experiment 2,we tried to set up a predictive model based on data sets collected.First,by applying a Gaussian Mixture Model,we found that one to one correspondence exists between the fans’ portraits and their impressions of preferred characters.Machine learning models are validated to predict the preferred characters directly through personality.The results show that Support Vector Machine can achieve the best result,and the accuracy rate is 10.34% on average based on random baseline of 5.8%.The discussion of results,along with possible applications of the prediction in the future,and the limitations and implications are presented.