Building on the notion that people respond to media as if they were real, switching off a robot which exhibits lifelike behavior implies an interesting situation. In an experimental lab study with a 2x2 between-subjects-design (N = 85), people were given the choice to switch off a robot with which they had just interacted. The style of the interaction was either social (mimicking human behavior) or functional (displaying machinelike behavior). Additionally, the robot either voiced an objection against being switched off or it remained silent. Results show that participants rather let the robot stay switched on when the robot objected. After the functional interaction, people evaluated the robot as less likeable, which in turn led to a reduced stress experience after the switching off situation. Furthermore, individuals hesitated longest when they had experienced a functional interaction in combination with an objecting robot. This unexpected result might be due to the fact that the impression people had formed based on the task-focused behavior of the robot conflicted with the emotional nature of the objection.

While some theories, such as the Media Equation, suggest that men will evaluate sex robots to be attractive, other assumptions (e.g., biases of norm adherence) would contradict this hypothesis. Therefore, the present study aimed at empirically comparing men's explicit and implicit evaluation of the (sexual) attractiveness of sex robots and women. At the same time, personal characteristics of the observer that might affect this evaluation were considered. An online survey (n = 229) and an affective priming experiment (n = 41) revealed that men rate women to be more attractive than robots if asked explicitly (=self-reported). However, this effect is not present when attractiveness is assessed implicitly (unbiased, directly). Moreover, affiliation-related traits such as loneliness, which have been assumed to be associated with the usage of sex dolls, are not related to the evaluation of attractiveness. Instead, a negative attitude towards robots is an important predictor.

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More and more TV series are using cross-media extensions like smartphone applications and social networking sites to connect with the audience. Because these features facilitate the recipient's interaction with a media persona, they can be assumed to influence the perceived parasocial interaction (PSI; Horton & Wohl, 1956). The goal of the present paper was to investigate the connection between cross-media extensions of a social TV series and the PSI with its protagonist. To this aim, a social TV series was used in which the viewer even had the possibility to add the fictitious protagonist as a Facebook friend, enabling the fictitious character to actively communicate with the audience. An online survey with 218 participants showed that, in particular, the Facebook friendship and thus the communication with a protagonist has an impact on the degree of PSI.

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