Each year, several dictionaries select a “Word of the Year,” meant to capture the zeitgeist and define a cultural trend of the past 12 months. Interestingly, though perhaps not shockingly, two of the 2025 words-of-the-year have been hot topics in media psychology for the past several years. And another relates heavily to our ongoing research on meme culture and virality in social media.

Cambridge Dictionary: “Parasocial”

First, the Cambridge Dictionary’s 2025 Word of the Year is “parasocial”—a term that goes back to Horton and Wohl’s 1956 article “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction” where it was applied primarily to television personalities. In their news release, Cambridge Dictionary did a good job of explaining why “parasocial” has reached a new level in the zeitgeist—starting with their social media announcement that included a photo of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce on the football field. 

Several media psychologists, including many members of Division 46, have researched and theorized extensively on parasocial experiences. As a personal example, last year I co-authored a study in Psychology of Popular Media on fans’ parasocial experiences with Jim and Pam from The Office (Reed et al., 2024).  Gayle S. Stever discusses the future of parasocial theory in the present issue.

Notably, Cambridge Dictionary extends its definition of parasocial to include one-sided relationships with AI, particularly with generative AI models like ChatGPT.  As media psychologists, we need to continue exploring whether the concept of parasociality can be sufficiently stretched to encapsulate one-sided connections with AI, given the affordances and potential for interaction (or pseudo-interaction) with some AI models. As an alternative, Starke and colleagues (2024) have proposed the term “synthetic relationships” wherein people having sustained interactions with AI are influenced by the AI—cognitively, affectively, and behaviorally.

Oxford: “Rage Bait”

Second, Oxford’s 2025 Word of the Year is “rage bait.” Intentionally provocative online content designed to elicit outrage is a near-perfect encapsulation of several psychological mechanisms: attentional biases, affective arousal, identity threat, parasocial conflict, moral judgment, and algorithmic amplification. Over the past year, we’ve seen “rage bait” posted by many people, from anonymous trolls to prominent public officials—content designed to generate an adverse reaction. Motivations can range from simple boredom alleviation, to filling an offline lack of social power, to more malevolent intentions like social and political polarization. While the term “clickbait” has been more prominent for a while, it doesn’t fully capture the emotional valence that is inherent in rage bait. For instance, a recent study on clickbait by Shin and colleagues (2025) suggests that “rage bait” should be conceptually and operationally distinguished from “information bait.” Digital natives and conservative media were found to be more likely to use emotionally laden rage bait to drive audience engagement, which was linked to higher levels of audience engagement.

Dictionary.com: “6-7”

Third—and I’m not convinced this counts as a word—Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year “6–7.” Cue the giggles of schoolchildren across the country. This term has no clear or agreed-upon meaning—and that’s where its power came from. The rise of “6–7” reflects a broader trend in which digital culture produces meaning through extremely compressed, memetic forms that circulate rapidly across social platforms. From a media psychology perspective, this kind of shorthand illustrates how attention-scarce, algorithmically driven environments privilege ambiguity, in-group signaling, and rapid emotional resonance over semantic clarity. In other words, “6–7” is less about linguistic precision and more about the speed with which communities co-construct meaning—an ongoing reminder that virality often depends on symbols that are flexible enough to be remixed, reinterpreted, and repurposed at scale.

Merriam Webster: “Slop”

Fourth, Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year is “slop”—as in low-quality, AI-generated content that has infiltrated many online spaces, including social media feeds. Notably, I recently published an article (Reed et al., 2025) spanning three years of research on how people engage with AI-created stories and attribute creative mental processes to AI models. This research began just a few months after ChatGPT was released, at a time when image-generating tools were only beginning to reach the public. Three years later, the technology has continued to advance. Consider Sora, the video-generation tool from OpenAI, which allows users to write prompts that place themselves into short-form videos, complete with script and audio.

As barriers to accessing generative AI platforms continue to decrease, we are seeing a consequential rise in low-quality, AI-generated content—and people are noticing (a win for digital media literacy!). This aligns closely with my research findings: when people engage with AI-generated content that exceeds their quality expectations, they tend to attribute greater creative capacity to the AI model. However, when the content falls short of expectations, people judge it more harshly and attribute significantly less creative ability to the AI. Taken together, these patterns suggest that public perceptions of AI creativity are not fixed but dynamically shaped by everyday encounters with quality—making discernment a defining factor in how generative AI is evaluated going forward.

References

Cambridge Dictionary. (2025). “Parasocial” is Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year 2025. https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/parasocial-is-cambridge-dictionary-word-of-the-year-2025

Dictionary.com. (2025). Word of the Year 2025: 6–7. https://www.dictionary.com/e/word-of-the-year-2025/

Merriam-Webster. (2025). Word of the Year. https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year

Oxford University Press. (2025). The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is “rage bait.” https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-is-rage-bait/

Reed, P. A., Shackleford, K. E., & Cohen, J. D. (2025). Credit for creativity: Engagement with artificial intelligence-generated stories and perceptions of artificial intelligence’s creative capacity. Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 6(4). https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000179

Reed, P. A., Shackleford, K. E., Cohen, J. D., & Robbins, M. J. (2024). Qualitative and quantitative investigations of Office fans’ connections with fictional and celebrity couples: Identification, parasocial relationships, and beyond. Psychology of Popular Media, 13(4), 729–740. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000552

Shin, J., DeFelice, C., & Kim, S. (2025). Emotion sells: Rage bait vs. information bait in clickbait news headlines on social media. Digital Journalism, 13(7), 1271–1290. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2025.2505566

Starke, C., Ventura, A., Bersch, C., Cha, M., de Vreese, C., Doebler, P., Dong, M., Krämer, N., Leib, M., Peter, J., Schäfer, L., Soraperra, I., Szczuka, J., Tuchtfeld, E., Wald, R., & Köbis, N. (2024). Risks and protective measures for synthetic relationships. Nature Human Behaviour, 8(10), 1834–1836. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-02005-4