Jealousy (1907) by Edvard Munch. Courtesy the Munch Museum/Wikipedia
Jealousy can rear its head in many ways. Have you ever felt displeased and resentful that a partner showed someone else ‘too much’ attention? Or that they spoke fondly about an ex? Or maybe you’ve felt unsettled when a best friend or a family member made social plans that didn’t include you? In situations like these, your feelings of jealousy might gnaw at you under the surface, or you could feel so hurt that you lash out at someone you love. Jealousy is a normal emotion and, like other emotions, it can affect people in both healthy and unhealthy ways…….Continue reading…
By Carla Marie Manly
Source: Psyche Guides
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Critics:
Jealousy generally refers to the thoughts or feelings of insecurity, fear, and concern over a relative lack of possessions or safety. Jealousy can consist of one or more emotions such as anger, resentment, inadequacy, helplessness or disgust. In its original meaning, jealousy is distinct from envy, though the two terms have popularly become synonymous in the English language, with jealousy now also taking on the definition originally used for envy alone.
These two emotions are often confused with each other, since they tend to appear in the same situation. Jealousy is a typical experience in human relationships, and it has been observed in infants as young as five months.Some researchers claim that jealousy is seen in all cultures and is a universal trait. However, others claim jealousy is a culture-specific emotion.
Jealousy can either be suspicious or reactive, and it is often reinforced as a series of particularly strong emotions and constructed as a universal human experience. Psychologists have proposed several models to study the processes underlying jealousy and have identified factors that result in jealousy.
Sociologists have demonstrated that cultural beliefs and values play an important role in determining what triggers jealousy and what constitutes socially acceptable expressions of jealousy. Biologists have identified factors that may unconsciously influence the expression of jealousy. Throughout history, artists have also explored the theme of jealousy in paintings, films, songs, plays, poems, and books, and theologians have offered religious views of jealousy based on the scriptures of their respective faiths.
People do not express jealousy through a single emotion or a single behavior.They instead express jealousy through diverse emotions and behaviors, which makes it difficult to form a scientific definition of jealousy. Scientists instead define it in their own words, as illustrated by the following examples:
“Romantic jealousy is here defined as a complex of thoughts, feelings, and actions which follow threats to self-esteem and/or threats to the existence or quality of the relationship, when those threats are generated by the perception of potential attraction between one’s partner and a (perhaps imaginary) rival.””Jealousy, then, is any aversive reaction that occurs as the result of a partner’s extradyadic relationship that is considered likely to occur.”
“Jealousy is conceptualized as a cognitive, emotional, and behavioral response to a relationship threat. In the case of sexual jealousy, this threat emanates from knowing or suspecting that one’s partner has had (or desires to have) sexual activity with a third party. In the case of emotional jealousy, an individual feels threatened by her or his partner’s emotional involvement with and/or love for a third party.”
“Jealousy is defined as a defensive reaction to a perceived threat to a valued relationship, arising from a situation in which the partner’s involvement with an activity and/or another person is contrary to the jealous person’s definition of their relationship.” “Jealousy is triggered by the threat of separation from, or loss of, a romantic partner, when that threat is attributed to the possibility of the partner’s romantic interest in another person.”
These definitions of jealousy share two basic themes. First, all the definitions imply a triad composed of a jealous individual, a partner, and a perception of a third party or rival. Second, all the definitions describe jealousy as a reaction to a perceived threat to the relationship between two people, or a dyad. Jealous reactions typically involve aversive emotions and/or behaviors that are assumed to be protective for their attachment relationships. These themes form the essential meaning of jealousy in most scientific studies.
Jealousy involves an entire “emotional episode” including a complex narrative. This includes the circumstances that lead up to jealousy, jealousy itself as emotion, any attempt at self regulation, subsequent actions and events, and ultimately the resolution of the episode. The narrative can originate from experienced facts, thoughts, perceptions, memories, but also imagination, guesses and assumptions.
The more society and culture matter in the formation of these factors, the more jealousy can have a social and cultural origin. By contrast, jealousy can be a “cognitively impenetrable state”, where education and rational belief matter very little. One possible explanation of the origin of jealousy in evolutionary psychology is that the emotion evolved in order to maximize the success of our genes: it is a biologically based emotion selected to foster the certainty about the paternity of one’s own offspring.
A jealous behavior, in women, is directed into avoiding sexual betrayal and a consequent waste of resources and effort in taking care of someone else’s offspring. There are, additionally, cultural or social explanations of the origin of jealousy. According to one, the narrative from which jealousy arises can be in great part made by the imagination. Imagination is strongly affected by a person’s cultural milieu. The pattern of reasoning, the way one perceives situations, depends strongly on cultural context.
It has elsewhere been suggested that jealousy is in fact a secondary emotion in reaction to one’s needs not being met, be those needs for attachment, attention, reassurance or any other form of care that would be otherwise expected to arise from that primary romantic relationship.
While mainstream psychology considers sexual arousal through jealousy a paraphilia, some authors on sexuality have argued that jealousy in manageable dimensions can have a definite positive effect on sexual function and sexual satisfaction. Studies have also shown that jealousy sometimes heightens passion towards partners and increases the intensity of passionate sex.
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