Coming soon: Post-Oprah depression?

If you’re blue over losing Oprah — or the characters from shows-gone-by like “Lost” or “Arrested Development” — that feeling can be explained by a term coined in the 1950s by a pair of psychiatrists: You’ve developed a “parasocial,” or one-sided, relationship with the people that live inside your TV (or inside your computer screen, if Hulu is more your thing).

“We develop these relationships with certain characters — and it doesn’t have to be a fictional character; it could be a TV personality, like Oprah,” says Emily Moyer-Guse, an assistant professor of communications at Ohio State University. She’s the lead author of the new study, which was published in the journal Mass Communication and Society.