Jealousy

Definition

Jealousy is an unpleasant emotion that arises when one perceives that some important aspect of one's relationship with another, or the relationship itself, is being threatened by someone else (a rival). For example, a person is likely to experience jealousy if his or her romantic partner appears to be emotionally or sexually interested in someone else. The term jealousy also applies to feelings that arise in other types of interpersonal relationships, such as when children exhibit distress over parents showering attention on a new sibling or when a person 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.

The proposed function of jealousy is to motivate behaviors that will reestablish the relationship between the self and the partner and break up the threatening liaison between the partner and rival. Because close personal relationships provide individuals with many physical and psychological benefits, it is important to have psychological predispositions toward maintaining them. In evolutionary terms, it is likely that people who established and protected their relationships typically produced more offspring. Thus, the psychological traits that helped maintain relationships would have been selected for and passed down to us through our genes. One possibility is that jealousy may have originally evolved as a response to competition of siblings who are rivals for a parent's time, attention, resources, and so forth, and was later usurped for the purpose of keeping friendships and romantic relationships together.

Background

Although few would doubt that jealousy involves negative feelings, there is no unanimous consensus on the exact nature of the distress. The feelings we call jealousy may be a blend of other more basic feelings, particularly of anger, fear, and sadness. One possibility is an individual may experience all of these emotions simultaneously during a jealous episode. Another possibility is, rather than experiencing several different emotions at once, a person experiences a series of different emotions over the course of a single jealousy episode. Which emotion is experienced would depend on what one focused or ruminated on. For example, thinking about the loss of the relationship might elicit sadness, while thinking about the partner's betrayal might elicit anger. A final possibility is that jealousy is its own distinct emotional state that elicits feelings and behaviors that are different from other emotions such as fear and anger.

Importance and Consequences of Jealousy

Jealousy can have powerful personal and social consequences. While it sometimes can lead to positive outcomes by redirecting a loved one's attention to the self and reestablishing bonds, it also can have serious [Page 508]negative costs. For example, jealousy is frequently implicated as a factor in spousal abuse and often ranks as the third or fourth most common motive in nonaccidental homicides across cultures.

The first signs of jealousy appear to occur early in life. Some research suggests that a parent merely directing attention to another child is, in and of itself, sufficient to elicit jealousy in infants as young as 6 months. These infants displayed more negative emotion when their mothers interacted with a life-like baby doll, relative to when their mothers behaved the same way toward a nonsocial toy (e.g., a book). This suggests that complex cognitions are not needed to elicit at least some primitive form of jealousy in infants. However, with development, social and cognitive factors become increasingly important. Even by preschool age, the specifics of a social triangle influence whether jealousy arises. For example, 4-yearolds demonstrated more jealousy when their mothers interacted with a similar-aged peer than when she interacted with an infant, whereas younger infants' jealousy was not affected by the rival's age. Thus, one of the changes that occurs with development is that a person's appraisal or assessment of the exact nature and meaning of the loved one and rival's interactions become increasingly important in whether jealousy is experienced.

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