Jealousy

Jealousy is an unpleasant emotion that arises when one perceives that an important relationship with another, or some aspect of that relationship, is threatened by a third party (a rival). It can have powerful personal and social impact. On the one hand, jealousy may lead to desirable outcomes: redirecting a loved one's attention to the self and reestablishing bonds. On the other hand, it also can have serious negative consequences. For example, jealousy is often implicated as a cause of spousal abuse and is the third or fourth most common motive in nonaccidental homicides across cultures. Romantic relationships provide particularly fertile ground for the elicitation of jealousy. However, jealous feelings also occur across a variety of interpersonal relationships. For example, jealousy can be experienced by children when their parents shower attention and affection on a sibling, or by a person who feels upset over being excluded by friends who are socializing together. Thus, jealousy requires the involvement of three individuals (the self, the partner, and the rival), which is sometimes referred to as a love triangle. This entry covers theories of jealousy, including conceptual debates about its origin and definition, presents empirical work on the ontogeny of jealousy as well as work on individual differences in jealousy, and discusses empirical challenges faced in the field.

Although everyone would agree that jealousy involves unpleasant feelings, there is no unanimity on the exact nature of the distress. The feelings we call jealousy may be a blend of affective reactions that arise from more basic emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness. One possibility is that all of these emotions may be experienced simultaneously by a person during a jealous episode. A second possibility is that an individual does not feel several emotions at once, but rather experiences a series of different emotions over the course of a single jealousy episode. Which emotion is felt at any given time would depend on the exact aspect of the situation on which the person is focused. For example, contemplating future loneliness when the relationship is over might elicit sadness, whereas focusing on the partner's dishonesty might elicit anger. A final possibility is that jealousy is a unique emotional state that produces its own distinct feelings and behaviors that differ from other emotions such as fear and anger. In any case, it is generally assumed that the function of jealousy is to motivate behaviors that will break up the threatening liaison between the partner and rival and maintain the relationship between the self and the partner.

Close personal relationships provide individuals with an abundance of physical and psychological benefits. Therefore, it is probable that people have a variety of psychological predispositions toward maintaining relationships. In human phylogenetic [Page 938]history, it is likely that people who established and protected relationships usually left more offspring. Thus, whatever psychological dispositions helped maintain relationships would have been selected for and passed down to us through our genes. Jealousy is likely to be one such evolved psychological trait. It may even have originally evolved as a response to competition among siblings who compete for a parent's resources, attention, and care. However, once jealousy evolved to protect one particular type of relationship, it likely became useful in protecting other important relationships such as friendships and romantic relationships from interlopers.

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