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FANatics: Systematic literature review of factors associated with celebrity worship, and suggested directions for future research
Abstract
A ‘culture of celebrity’ began to emerge in the twentieth century, profoundly impacting the social world. Recent years have seen the publication of an increasing wealth of literature focusing on people who are enthralled with celebrities – often to the point of obsession – termed ‘celebrity worshippers’. The current paper systematically reviews this literature to gain a comprehensive understanding of the various factors associated with celebrity worship and to identify gaps in the literature. Papers were identified through a systematic literature search and 62 were deemed relevant for inclusion in the review. These provided evidence that celebrity worship may be related to demographic factors (e.g. age); personality factors (e.g. dimensions of the psychoticism-extraversion-neuroticism model, materialism); religiosity; behavioural and cognitive-behavioural factors (e.g. fantasy proneness, obsessive behaviours); feelings about the self or the world (e.g. self-esteem); cognitive factors (e.g. cognitive flexibility, critical thinking); relationships with others (e.g. attachment style, romantic relationship style); attitudes towards the body, eating, and cosmetic surgery; and psychological wellbeing (e.g. depression, anxiety). The results are used to help researchers understand the individual and psychosocial factors associated with celebrity worship, and directions for future research in this area are identified.
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“While such connections can be supportive, intense attachments may contribute to withdrawal, obsessive checking, or negative self-evaluations, especially among isolated youth [28, 47].”
From Understanding Teen Overreliance on AI Companion Chatbots Through Self-Reported Reddit Narratives (2026) · cites this paper as [28]
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredIn the citing paper
“The cultlike status of celebrities (Brooks, 2021; McCutcheon et al., 2002) may rest on virtually all of them being in the business of storytelling.”
From Stories in Action. (2022) · cites this paper as Brooks, 2021
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“The cultlike status of celebrities (Brooks, 2021; McCutcheon et al., 2002) may rest on virtually all of them being in the business of storytelling.”
BackgroundUnderstanding Teen Overreliance on AI Companion Chatbots Through Self-Reported Reddit Narratives
Namvarpour, M. (., Brofsky, B., Medina, J. Y., Akter, M., & Razi, A. (2026) · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3772318.3790597 · Cited by 24
Qu, F., & Zhong, L. (2025) · Acta Psychologica · doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2025.105935 · Cited by 1
Metadata
- Authors
- Brooks, S. K.
- ORCID
- Brooks, Samantha K.
- Venue
- Current Psychology
- Published
- 2018-09-26
- Volume
- 40
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 864-886
- ISSN
- 1046-1310
- 1936-4733
- Cited by
- 75
- References
- 4
- Language
- en
- Funders
- King's College London
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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