Parasocial Relationships Across Four Decades: A Systematic Thematic and Temporal Review

Parasocial relationships — the one-sided socio-emotional bonds that audiences form with media figures — have been studied for nearly seventy years, yet the construct has been repeatedly reconfigured as the media environment has changed. This systematic review synthesizes forty-one peer-reviewed studies and book chapters published between 1987 and 2025, spanning communication, media psychology, and marketing scholarship. The corpus is analyzed through two complementary lenses. A thematic analysis identifies eight research streams: conceptual and theoretical foundations, measurement and scale development, well-being and psychology, social media and platforms, marketing and consumer behavior, children and development, contact and prejudice and politics, and human-computer interaction. A temporal analysis resolves the literature into three developmental phases — a foundational period (1987–2008) preoccupied with establishing the construct's legitimacy, a diversification period (2010–2017) reorganized by the arrival of social media, and an application and consolidation period (2018–2025) characterized by applied domains, new methods, and synthesizing work. Three theoretical trajectories cut across both phase and theme: the progressive erosion of the non-reciprocity premise, the empirical reversal of the compensation hypothesis, and the persistent instability of measurement. The review argues that the parasocial relationship remains a construct in active definition rather than one settled and merely applied, and that emerging conversational artificial intelligence will force the field's defining assumption of non-reciprocity toward resolution.