Parasocial jealousy is real: Study finds fans feel more threatened when rivals differ from them

New research published in Psychology of Popular Media finds that people in one-sided romantic attachments with celebrities — known as parasocial romantic relationships — can experience jealousy when their favorite media figures begin a real-life romance. But not just any relationship triggers these feelings. The study suggests that jealousy is most likely when people feel the celebrity’s new partner is different from themselves, and when the new relationship feels like it might end the imagined connection altogether.

Parasocial romantic relationships, or PSRRs, are emotional bonds that people form with media figures such as celebrities, fictional characters, or influencers. While the target of the relationship is typically unaware of the admirer, the feelings involved can be meaningful and even mirror those of traditional relationships. Because jealousy is a common feature in close romantic bonds, the researchers behind this study wanted to know whether similar emotional reactions occur in parasocial contexts — especially when a celebrity becomes romantically involved with someone else.

The study builds on earlier work suggesting that jealousy can occur even when only one person is emotionally invested in a relationship. Prior studies showed that fans who imagine themselves in a romantic bond with a media figure can react negatively to news of that celebrity entering a new romantic relationship.

However, the current study goes a step further by testing a well-known psychological theory of jealousy that was developed for social relationships — specifically, White and Mullen’s model, which proposes that jealousy arises when people perceive a threat to a valued relationship. This threat can take the form of feeling that the relationship will end, that benefits such as attention or closeness will be lost, or that one’s self-esteem is being undermined.

“I typically study the ‘dark side’ of relationships and relationship stressors such as jealousy in more traditional social relationships. The third author on this study is a graduate student who is interested in parasocial relationships. She needed more research experience, so we merged our interests into a study that we both found intriguing,” said study author Jessica Frampton, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

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“To me, parasocial relationships seemed like a good context to test boundary conditions of theorizing surrounding jealousy. Using interpersonal theories (or a model in this case) with parasocial relationships also lets us test the assertion that parasocial relationships function similarly to more reciprocal social relationships. So, my personal interest in this particular research topic was mainly motivated by a desire to test and refine theorizing while helping out a graduate student!”

Frampton, along with co-authors Jesse Fox and Brooke Bennington, recruited 309 participants from a college student pool who reported feeling romantic attraction toward a media figure. Participants were asked to identify a celebrity or character they had a crush on, and a romantic rival — someone the target media figure was or had been romantically linked to. The sample included a wide range of media figures, from actors and musicians to fictional characters and YouTubers.

Participants completed surveys measuring how strong their parasocial romantic relationship was, how jealous they felt about the celebrity’s romantic involvement with someone else, and how threatened they felt in three specific ways: by a loss of benefits from the relationship, by damage to their self-esteem, and by the potential end of the imagined relationship. They also rated how similar they felt to the romantic rival, which allowed researchers to explore whether this perceived similarity influenced how threatening the rival seemed.

The findings showed that stronger parasocial romantic relationships were linked to higher levels of jealousy. But when it came to what actually explained this jealousy, only one type of perceived threat mattered: the fear that the relationship might end. The other two possible sources of threat — losing benefits from the relationship and damage to self-esteem — did not significantly explain the link between relationship strength and jealousy once all three were considered together.

In other words, people who were more romantically attached to a media figure tended to feel jealous not because they feared they were less attractive or would get less emotional payoff, but because they worried the imagined connection itself might disappear.

The study also uncovered a more nuanced finding. Whether people felt threatened by the rival depended on how similar they thought they were to that person. Interestingly, feeling dissimilar to the rival intensified the perceived threat, especially the sense that the parasocial bond could be lost. For people who felt that the rival was unlike them, their strong attachment to the celebrity predicted greater fear that the relationship was over, which in turn predicted more jealousy. On the other hand, those who saw the rival as similar to themselves felt less threatened and, as a result, experienced less jealousy.

“People who have ‘celebrity crushes’ can become jealous when their target media figures become romantically involved with someone else, especially if that ‘someone else’ is different from the person with the crush,” Frampton told PsyPost. “This jealousy occurs because it feels like their connection to the media figure will be lost rather than because the media figure’s new relationship threatens their self-esteem or reduces any sort of benefits they get.”

This pattern was somewhat unexpected. Prior research has shown mixed results when it comes to how rival similarity affects jealousy in traditional relationships. In some cases, people feel more jealous when rivals are similar because they seem more directly comparable. In other situations, dissimilarity makes the rival seem more threatening because it suggests that the partner is looking for something entirely different. In this study, the dissimilarity appeared to matter more — perhaps because it made fans feel that they were fundamentally not what the celebrity wanted, raising the possibility that their imagined connection was no longer viable.

“The finding regarding perceived relationship existence threat was not that surprising, as that threat is often considered the primary threat in more traditional social relationships as well,” Frampton said. “However, the finding about perceived similarity to the rival was somewhat surprising. I could envision both similar and dissimilar rivals as upsetting, so to learn that it was the dissimilarity that was the issue was interesting.”

Although the researchers found meaningful patterns, they also noted some limitations. The participants were mostly young college students, which means the results might not reflect how other age groups or more diverse populations experience parasocial jealousy. The average levels of jealousy and threat reported in the study were also relatively low, which is consistent with past research showing that parasocial relationships tend to be less intense than face-to-face romantic relationships. That said, stronger reactions might be found among more passionate fan groups or people with particularly strong parasocial bonds.

“I have a pipeline of research on jealousy in more traditional social relationships,” Frampton added. “I often study jealousy regarding a partner’s prior romantic and sexual experiences (i.e., retroactive jealousy), so I have studies on why people experience retroactive jealousy and how people communicate about it with their partners. I am also continuing to test, extend, and refine my specialness meaning framework model of jealousy.”

The study, “Jealousy, Threat, and Romantic Rivals in Parasocial Romantic Relationships,” was authored by Jessica R. Frampton, Jesse Fox, and Brooke Bennington.