Jealousy

• 1. The Green-Eyed Monster

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  In 1906, an American journal of psychology declared that the weight of quotable male authority held women to be more susceptible to jealousy. Alongside that claim sat a line attributed to Confucius, who named jealousy among the five worst maladies said to afflict the female mind. The judgment was confident. It was also, by the standards of the research that followed, almost entirely unexamined.

  Jealousy is an emotion most people recognize the instant they feel it, yet scientists struggle to pin it down in a single sentence. People do not express it through one feeling or one behavior. They express it through anger, resentment, inadequacy, helplessness, even disgust, all at once. That tangle is what makes a clean definition so hard to write.

  A jealous person fears losing something they believe is theirs. An envious person wants something they do not have. These sound like the same emotion, and in everyday English they have nearly merged. But that merger is recent, and the line between the two has tripped up thinkers for centuries. The questions ahead run from a child unsettled by a lifelike doll, to dogs nudging away a toy, to the way a romantic comedy teaches viewers what jealousy is supposed to look like.

• 2. A Word That Resisted Naming

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  The English word jealousy travels back through the French jalousie, formed from jaloux, and before that the Low Latin zelosus, meaning full of zeal. Its deepest root is the Greek ζῆλος, which sometimes meant jealousy but more often carried a positive charge, emulation, ardour, zeal. The root even connotes the act of boiling, fermenting, or yeast rising. One older origin word, gelus, meant possessive and suspicious, and it eventually softened into jelus.

  Margot Grzywacz studied the word across Romance and Germanic languages and reached a striking conclusion. The concept of jealousy was among the hardest of all ideas to capture in language, and so it was one of the last to find an unambiguous term. Classical Latin made do with invidia, a single word that did not bother to separate envy from jealousy. Only in the postclassical era did Latin borrow the late, poetic Greek zelotypia and the adjective zelosus. From that adjective came French jaloux, Provençal gelos, Italian geloso, Spanish celoso, and Portuguese cioso, a whole family of words tracing to one reluctant ancestor.

  The color green entered the picture through William Shakespeare, whose phrase the green-eyed monster fixed the link between green and jealousy. From that association grew the common expression green with envy, a phrase whose own tangling of the two emotions hints at how stubbornly they refuse to stay apart.

• 3. Jealousy Is Not Envy

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  Philosopher John Rawls drew the cleanest line between the two emotions. Jealousy, he argued, involves the wish to keep what one has, while envy is the wish to get what one does not have. A child is jealous of a parent's attention to a sibling, but envious of a friend's new bicycle. The same distinction comes from psychologists Laura Guerrero and Peter Andersen, who describe the jealous person as someone who possesses a valued relationship but fears losing it, against the envious person who lacks a valued thing and longs to have it.

  Gerrod Parrott went further, separating the inner worlds of the two states. Jealousy, in his account, runs on fear of loss, suspicion or anger over a perceived betrayal, low self-esteem, sadness, distrust, and the dread of losing an important person to someone else. Envy runs on a different fuel: feelings of inferiority, longing, resentment of one's circumstances, and ill will toward the envied person, often shadowed by guilt. Envy can also carry a motivation to improve and a wish to possess the rival's qualities.

  Parrott concedes that the two can fire at once, and that envy about a rival can intensify jealousy itself. The overlap is not an accident. A person may envy the very traits of someone who is also a romantic rival, and may envy the affection a partner gives to that rival, affection the jealous person feels entitled to. The self-help shelf has not helped clarify matters; Nancy Friday's book Jealousy stretches the word across passions from envy to lust to greed.

• 4. The Triad And The Threat

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  Romantic jealousy has been defined as a complex of thoughts, feelings, and actions that follow threats to self-esteem and to a relationship, when those threats come from a real or potential attraction between one's partner and a perhaps imaginary rival. Other scientists offer their own wordings, but the definitions converge on two shared themes. Every one of them describes a triad: a jealous individual, a partner, and the perception of a third party. And every one describes a reaction to a perceived threat against the bond between two people.

  What separates the varieties is the nature of the threat. Sexual jealousy ignites when someone knows or suspects that a partner has had, or wants, sexual activity with a third person. Emotional jealousy stirs when a partner becomes emotionally involved with, or in love with, someone else. Romantic jealousy, by contrast, is keyed to threats against the self and the relationship rather than to sexual interest. Feelings of inadequacy as a partner, a wish for sexual exclusivity, and having poured more effort into the relationship all correlate with more jealousy, in both genders.

  Jealousy can also be suspicious or reactive, and it tends to be reinforced as a chain of unusually strong emotions. It arrives not as a single feeling but as an entire emotional episode, a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and a resolution. That narrative can grow from experienced facts and memories, or from imagination, guesses, and assumptions, which is where culture begins to shape what a person feels.

• 5. Born Or Built

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  Infants as young as five months have shown signs of jealousy, and research by Sybil Hart at Texas Tech University puts the capacity even earlier. In her work, babies as young as six months grew distressed when their mothers turned attention to a lifelike doll, while staying calm when the attention went to a non-social object. That early reaction, Hart suggests, may lay the groundwork for sibling rivalry, explaining why a child shows distress when a new sibling arrives.

  Evolutionary psychology offers one origin story for the emotion. By this account, jealousy was selected to maximize the success of one's genes, fostering certainty about the paternity of one's own offspring. In women, jealous behavior is framed as a guard against sexual betrayal and the waste of resources on someone else's child. Mainstream psychology classes sexual arousal through jealousy as a paraphilia, yet some writers on sexuality argue the opposite case, that jealousy in manageable measure can lift sexual function and satisfaction, and that it sometimes heightens passion and the intensity of sex.

  Culture supplies the competing explanation. The narrative behind jealousy can be built largely by the imagination, and imagination is shaped by a person's cultural milieu. Some researchers argue jealousy is a universal trait seen in every culture; others insist it is culture-specific. One further view holds jealousy to be a secondary emotion, a reaction to unmet needs for attachment, attention, or reassurance. There is also a darker register: obsessive jealousy, marked by obsessional thoughts of the partner, which can take the form of obsessive compulsive disorder.

• 6. What Culture Decides

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  Attitudes toward jealousy shifted sharply in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. People adopted far more negative views of the emotion. As men and women grew more equal, openly expressing jealousy became less acceptable, a reminder that what a society tolerates can change within a single lifetime.

  A study set out to compare jealousy across four cultures, Ireland, Thailand, India, and the United States, chosen to draw out differences in how the emotion is shown. It found that male-dominant cultures are more likely to express and reveal jealousy, and that Thais were the least likely of the four to express it. The proposed reason is that men in some of these settings are effectively rewarded for displaying jealousy, because certain women read it as a sign of love. The same dynamic surfaces in romantic comedies, where a man's jealousy of a rival can be received as evidence that he cares more.

  The digital age added a new trigger. A study across three Spanish-speaking countries found that Facebook jealousy is real. It feeds ordinary relationship jealousy, and participants who experienced it also reported lower self-esteem as a result.

• 7. How People Respond

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  Communicative responses are one of the most studied parts of romantic jealousy, because how a person reacts can either repair a relationship or wreck it. Done well, these responses reduce uncertainty, restore self-esteem, and can leave a relationship more satisfying than before. Guerrero and colleagues sorted face-to-face, partner-directed reactions into six interactive types, arranged along scales of threat and directness. At the low end sits avoidance or denial, going silent or pretending nothing is wrong. Integrative communication, low in threat but high in directness, means explaining feelings or calmly questioning a partner. Higher up come active distancing, negative affect expression like crying or sulking, distributive communication such as rude or abrasive remarks, and finally violent communication and threats.

  Guerrero's team also mapped five general behavior responses, sorted by whether they target the partner or the rival and aim at discovery or repair. Surveillance and restriction means watching a rival or limiting a partner's contact. Rival contacts means confronting the rival directly. Manipulation attempts try to test a partner's loyalty or stir guilt. Compensatory restoration, the rare positively charged option, looks like sending flowers to a partner. Violent behavior, such as slamming doors, sits at the destructive extreme.

  The specific emotion shapes the response. Jealous anger tends toward aggressive reactions, while irritation leans toward constructive ones. Integrative communication, compensatory restoration, and negative affect expression have all been linked to positive outcomes. Researchers also find that jealousy can spring from mismatched ideas about commitment rather than biology alone. People who prize long-term relationships over sexual exclusivity proved more likely to feel jealous over emotional infidelity than physical.

• 8. Dogs, Movies, And The Divine

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  Researchers at the University of California, San Diego brought jealousy studies out of the human realm and into the kennel. In a paper published in PLOS ONE in 2014, they reported that a significant number of dogs showed jealous behaviors when their owners gave attention to dog-like toys, far more than when the owners attended to non-social objects. Mellissa Starling, an animal behavior consultant at the University of Sydney, noted that dogs are social animals who obey a group hierarchy, and that changes at home, like the arrival of a baby, can prompt a family pet to behave unexpectedly.

  On screen, jealousy is often dressed up as proof of deep love rather than destructive obsession. Jessica R. Frampton counted 230 instances of romantic jealousy across the 51 top-grossing romantic comedies from 2002 to 2014, with Forgetting Sarah Marshall alone holding 19. Of those instances, 58 percent were reactive jealousy and 31 percent possessive, with anxious jealousy the rarest at 11 percent. Among the 361 reactions catalogued, 53 percent were destructive and only 19 percent constructive. Another study by Ferris, Smith, Greenberg, and Smith found that heavy viewers of reality dating shows tended to endorse the dating attitudes those shows display, mirroring even violent or aggressive jealous behavior.

  Religion forms the last frontier of the emotion. The study of jealousy in faith compares how scriptures and teachings handle two distinct issues: the concept of divine jealousy, and the rules each tradition sets for provoking and expressing human jealousy. The biblical sense of zeal, after all, was once understood as tolerating no unfaithfulness, the same root that gave the world its most troublesome word for the feeling.