The concepts of Emotional response to films and Identification remain a commonly called upon resource for considering how media audiences might be influenced into taking up moral and cultural positions. This article shows different theoretical approaches for studying this topic and it provides the findings of empirical investigationsconducted in the past years. Methodological questions arise during the surveys could be indicatives of the problems in this specific area of Communication Studies.  

This article presents the results of an investigation carried out on the followers of the television series The Newsroom (HBO) in Spain. Two focus groups (N = 17) were carried out. They included journalists (with different roles in local and national media) and journalism students from various Spanish universities. The participants were questioned about their experiences, knowledge, and perceptions of the plot and the characters of the audiovisual fiction. The interpretation of the data was made from four levels, which evaluated the emotional involvement from lower to higher degree: (1) transportation, (2) identification, (3) parasocial interaction, and (4) worship. The central hypothesis raised the relationship between the ethical values of The Newsroom and the high emotional involvement of the fans. The results obtained will help to understand the high degree of identification of the s...