Hodges, Sara D.Anderson, Taylor2024-08-302024-08-302024https://hdl.handle.net/1794/29877“Love-to-hate” characters are fictional characters who do bad things or who are considered villains, but they still draw viewers to them. We often disapprove of people who behave in this way, so why do we connect with these characters and is our connection to them similar to the connection we make with characters we unambiguously admire? This exploratory study will use previously collected data (N=498) to investigate the qualities of love-to-hate characters in popular media. College students rated love-to-hate characters, as well as themselves and characters they admire, on 40 evaluative traits (both likable and unlikable). Certain traits were consistently associated with the love-to-hate characters. Additional analyses will compare the Euclidean distance between the self and a love-to-hate character to the distance between the self and an unambiguously admired character in order to identify aspects of love-to-hate characters that potentially mirror some aspect of the self.en-USCC BY-NC-ND 4.0Self-Other OverlapCharactersLove-to-HateMorally Ambiguous CharactersVillainsThesis/Dissertation0009-0009-6038-8821