Star-struck teenagers--exemplified by the 14-year-old girl with Orlando Bloom posters plastered on her bedroom walls and the Orlando Bloom screen saver on her computer--are generally the most well-adjusted and popular, according to a new study from Britain's Universities of Leicester and Coventry. Having a passionate interest in a celebrity is an important part of growing up and encourages healthy development and bonding for teens, reports New Scientist.

There is a gotcha, though. Kids who have an extreme fascination with celebrities are more likely to be lonely and not have close friends.

When researchers John Maltby and David Giles interviewed 191 English schoolchildren ages 11 to 16, they found that those who avidly followed the lives of their favorite celebrities were also the most popular. Gossiping about those celebrities took up much social time for about 30 percent of the teens. These kids also had a particularly strong and close network of friends and created a healthy emotional distance from their parents.

"As children grow up, they start to transfer their attachment from parents to their peers. Celebrities start to take on the hero status role that their parents formerly fulfilled when the children were younger, and it seems to be a healthy part of development," Maltby told New Scientist. "The main function of celebrity attachments in adolescence may be as an extended social network--a group of 'pseudo-friends' who form the subject of peer gossip and discussion. The ongoing subject of celebrities' lives can provide a valuable bonding tool among their friends, while enabling them to be emotionally autonomous from their parents."

That's the good news. But like anything, celebrity worship can go too far. About 8 percent of the teens who were surveyed expressed a fanatic interest in their celebrity "friends," believing they had a personal relationship with the famous individual. Some of the kids even went so far as to claim they were "soul mates." Not only is this a problem, but also some psychologists see it as mildly pathologic, especially because these children were lonely individuals with few friends, who were less attached to their parents. Maltby thinks such intense attachment to celebrities may have begun during times of stress or because these kids lack basic social skills.

The research finding were published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.