Review Article

AI companions and emotional dependency

A scoping review of conceptualization, correlates, and consequences

  • Miguel Torres Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain
  • Clara Fernández Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain

Abstract

Background. AI companions such as Replika and Character.AI support persistent, emotionally meaningful interaction, and a growing literature examines attachment, companionship, reliance, and problematic use. This review maps how these constructs are represented and where emotional dependency can be distinguished from adjacent relational phenomena. Methods. We conducted a scoping review guided by PRISMA-ScR using a two-concept search strategy across OpenAlex, Europe PMC, PubMed, and arXiv. Searches were run on 22 August 2026 for 2018–2026. The APIs reported 10,200 hits; 10,145 records were retrieved, 772 duplicates were removed, and 9,373 unique records were screened by one reviewer with rule assistance. Eligibility assessment used full text where accessible and title, abstract, and metadata where it was not. Results. Two hundred fifty-one primary empirical records were retained, with 12 review/synthesis records used only as secondary sources. The corpus is highly recent (71 records from 2025 and 139 from 2026). Abstract-derived coding most frequently identified loneliness (n = 50), attachment (n = 35), anthropomorphism (n = 28), trust (n = 19), self-disclosure (n = 18), and parasocial interaction (n = 18); problematic use was explicit in four records. No field-standard measure of emotional dependency was identified in the current mapping, although measurement-instrument extraction remains incomplete for records without full-text review. Conclusions. The literature supports treating engagement, attachment, reliance, dependency, and problematic dependency as analytically distinct concepts, but the proposed ordering is a heuristic synthesis and should not be read as a validated developmental sequence. Priorities are complete full-text verification, improved measurement, and longitudinal or experimental tests of transitions and causal direction.

Keywords

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