Fandom identification and in-person activities as mediators of the association between cosplay and psychological well-being
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cosplay, a portmanteau of the words ‘costume’ and ‘roleplay’, involves fans dressing up and acting out fictional characters, usually at fan-themed events. Previous research on cosplay and well-being has found that people who cosplay, compared to non-cosplaying anime fans, experience more positive well-being, in part because they are more likely to disclose their fan interests to others rather than hiding it. In the present study we expand upon prior research by testing whether fandom identification and attending events mediate the association between cosplaying (i.e. a sample of cosplayers vs. non-cosplaying anime fans) and well-being. The results provide evidence for a serial mediation model consistent with our predictions and with prior findings. We discuss implications for measuring well-being in fan communities, including both cosplayers and non-cosplaying fans, as well as the potential benefits of in-person contact with members of one’s fandom.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".