Jealousy

This article critically analyzes Rawls’s attitude towards envy. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls is predominantly concerned with the threat that class envy – or what he calls general envy – poses to political stability. By contrast, he does not think that particular envy – the type of envy that arises between peers competing for the same objects – would be in any way problematic for his ideal political society. I contest this claim by pointing to the politically deleterious effects (...) that peer envy would likely have within a society ordered according to his principles of justice. Section 1 reconstructs Rawls’s conception of peer envy, underlining the causal connection that he draws between this emotion and rivalry. Section 2 argues that since Rawls wishes to promote rivalry within the political and economic spheres, there is good reason to believe that his ideal just society would be marked by elevated levels of peer envy – and perhaps hazardously so. In Section 3, I then briefly turn to ancient Greece, showing how its agonistic culture generated politically destabilizing levels of peer envy. This is followed by an overview of the key institutional mechanisms that the Greeks developed in order to keep peer envy within socially beneficial limits. I conclude that if Rawlsians wish to establish a society structured around political and economic rivalry, they would do well to reflect on the institutional means by which peer envy can be effectively harnessed. (shrink)

This comment on Chung and Harris presses for a clearer account of the motivational role of jealousy within the dynamic functional model of jealousy. It also calls into question the inclusion of “elaborated” jealousy within the emotion itself. It argues that differentiating emotional motivation from motivation toward the same goal that an emotion has requires additional resources.

The article by Chung and Harris brings together an impressive array of literature to formulate a dynamic functional model of jealousy. There is much to like about the model. However, one concern is how it advances a theory of jealousy. Another concern is how the DFMJ operates over time, with different social groups, and cross-culturally. In general, however, the model offers a useful way to think about jealousy for the future.

On conçoit souvent la jalousie comme une émotion ayant pour objet les relations de proximité (amour, amitié, fratrie, etc.). Elle a généralement mauvaise presse et est typiquement envisagée comme une émotion moralement condamnable, voire comme un vice. Or, la jalousie ne porte pas uniquement sur les relations de proximité : elle peut également porter sur divers biens (prestige, richesses, biens matériels, privilèges, etc.). Par ailleurs, certains auteurs soutiennent que des cas de jalousie pourraient être moralement justifiés, voire que la jalousie (...) pourrait être une vertu. La jalousie paraît également jouer un rôle dans l’institution et le maintien d’institutions visant à perpétuer des inégalités entre les individus jaloux de leurs avantages et ceux qu’ils envisagent comme des concurrents cherchant à les déposséder de leurs biens. De fait, la jalousie paraît utile pour la théorie politique de par les liens qu’elle entretient avec la justice distributive. Cet article propose, dans la première section, une discussion portant sur la nature de la jalousie où elle est contrastée avec l’envie et l’indignation. Dans la seconde section, on se demandera si la jalousie est un vice, ou si elle peut être parfois moralement justifiée, ou même être une vertu. La troisième section traitera les rôles joués par la jalousie collective dans la justice distributive et la fondation et le maintien d’institutions sociales visant à protéger les intérêts des jaloux. Pour le faire, le cas de la jalousie économique, telle que David Hume et Adam Smith la concevaient dans les relations commerciales entre États européens au XVIIIème siècle, est considéré. (shrink)

This paper responds to an ingenious footnote from Robert Nozick’s book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Using a table of four possible situations, Nozick defines what it is to be jealous, envious, begrudging, spiteful and competitive. I deny a claim that Nozick makes for his table, a claim needed for these definitions. I also point out that Nozick fails to capture what he has in mind by jealousy.

Proust reminds us many times in the pages of In Search of Lost Time that there is no such thing as a singular or unchanging self.1 When viewing the novel as a whole, this point is most evident in the journey of Marcel, the narrator, who has to become a myriad of Marcels before he reaches the library of the Guermantes and the discovery of what he must write about. But the theme is also prevalent in a more intimate reading (...) of the novel's many vignettes. Swann, for instance, cannot understand the torment he has gone through for a woman who wasn't his type precisely because he has ceased to be the Swann who desired Odette. Rather, the newfound subjectivity he inhabits at the end of Swann in Love takes him back to an... (shrink)

I argue for the view that envy and jealousy are distinct emotions, whose crucial difference is that envy involves a perception of lack while jealousy involves a perception of loss. I start by noting the common practice of using ‘envy’ and ‘jealousy’ almost interchangeably, and I contrast it with the empirical evidence that shows that envy and jealousy are distinct, albeit similar and often co-occurring, emotions. I then argue in favor of a specific way of understanding their distinction: the view (...) that envy is a response to a perceived lack of a valuable object, while jealousy is a response to a perceived loss of a valuable object. I compare such a view with the most compelling alternative theories, and show that it accounts better for paradigmatic cases. I conclude by showing how the lack vs. loss model can handle complications: ambiguous cases, that is, when it is epistemically unclear whether one experiences lack or loss; hybrid cases, that is, when one seems to experience both lack and loss; and borderline cases, that is, when it is metaphysically unclear whether one experiences lack or loss. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses the widespread claim that jealousy is a response to infidelity. According to this claim, herewith called the entitlement theory, jealousy is only an appropriate response to a relationship between a loved one and a rival if, by entertaining this relationship, the loved one does not treat the jealous person the way she is entitled to be treated. I reconstruct different versions of ET, each of them providing a different answer to the question why we should assume (...) that jealousy is a response to infidelity. I show that even the most plausible versions enjoy less argumentative support than it seems at first sight. The positive aim of this paper is to present a more inclusive account of jealousy as an alternative to ET. According to this account, jealousy serves to disturb the rival relationship and to gain the attention and affection of the loved person. Jealousy so understood is not only an appropriate response to infidelity but has wider appropriateness conditions. However, it plays a role in the negotiation of norms concerning exclusivity in personal relationships. The inclusive account does justice to the continuity and commonalities between adult and infant protest against rival relationships. (shrink)

In this synthesis, we summarize studies that yielded evidence of jealousy in young infants. To shed light on this phenomenon, we present evidence that jealousy’s foundation rests on history of dyadic interactions with caregivers which engender infants’ expectations of exclusivity, and on maturation of sociocognitive capacities that enable infants to evaluate whether an exchange between their caregiver and another child represents a violation of that expectation. We conclude with a call for greater study of the antecedents and sequelae of both (...) normative and atypical presentations of jealousy. In addition, we recommend approaches that address jealousy across a range of relationships, both within and beyond those which include attachment figures. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to provide a critical review of recent writings about jealousy in psychology, as seen from a philosophical perspective. At a more general level of inquiry, jealousy offers a useful lens through which to study generic issues concerned with the conceptual and moral nature of emotions, as well as the contributions that philosophers and social scientists can make to understanding them. Hence, considerable space is devoted to comparisons of psychological and philosophical approaches to emotion research (...) in general. It turns out that although arguments about the necessary conceptual features of jealousy qua specific emotion, do carry philosophical mileage, they may fail to cut ice with psychologists who tend to focus on jealousy as a broad dimension of temperament. The review reveals a disconcerting lack of cross-disciplinary work on jealousy: the sort of work that has moved the discourse on other emotions forward in recent years. (shrink)

This study examined the relationships of perceived ethical leadership, workplace jealousy, and organizational citizenship behaviors directed at individuals and organizations. Survey responses were collected from 491 employee-coworker pairs from 33 hospitals in Taiwan. The employees provided assessments of their perceived ethical leadership and the workplace jealousy they experienced, while the coworkers provided information about the employees’ OCBI and OCBO. In the hypotheses testing, perceived ethical leadership was found to be negatively related to employees’ workplace jealousy and jealousy was negatively related (...) to their OCBI and OCBO. Workplace jealousy partially mediated the effect of ethical leadership on OCBI and OCBO. In addition, perceived ethical leadership was found to have a moderation effect on the jealousy-OCBI/ocbo relationship. This study contributes to the literature of ethical leadership as well as to the literature of OCB by relating workplace jealousy to OCB and by making sense of the effects of ethical leadership on OCB through the mediation of jealousy and through the moderation of ethical leadership on the jealousy-OCB relationship. (shrink)

Taking as its starting point a previous work by the author which reviewed early philosophical sources on jealousy and proposed both a conceptual and moral account of this much-maligned emotion, the present article reviews the relevant philosophical literature from the last decade or so. Most noticeable is how scarce those sources still are. Special attention is given, however, to a new conceptual model proposed by Purshouse and Fredericks which rejects the standard architectonic of jealousy as a three-party compound emotion. While (...) the essential contours of the new model are rejected, Fredericks is shown to offer some powerful misgivings about putative instrumentalist defences of jealousy. In addition to this new model, a number of other recent writings about jealousy – historical, conceptual and moral – are subjected to critical scrutiny in this overview article. (shrink)

Modern evolutionary psychology provides a cogent criterion for considering an emotion as “basic”: Whether the emotion evolved to solve an adaptive problem tributary to reproduction. Criteria such as distinctive universal signals, presence in other primates, or contribution to survival are not relevant, even though some basic emotions have these properties. Abundant evidence suggests that sexual jealousy is properly considered a basic emotion, even though it lacks a distinct expressive signature, contributes to adaptive problems of mating rather than survival, and may (...) or may not be present in other primates. (shrink)

Envy and Jealousy in Classical Athens examines the sensation, expression, and literary representation of envy and jealousy in Classical Athens.

_A witty and insightful investigation into the green-eyed monster’s role in our lives_ Compete, acquire, succeed, enjoy: the pressures of living in today’s materialistic world seem predicated upon jealousy—the feelings of rivalry and resentment for possession of whatever the other has. But while our newspapers abound with stories of the sometimes droll, sometimes deadly consequences of sexual jealousy, Peter Toohey argues in this charmingly provocative book that jealousy is much more than the destructive emotion it is commonly assumed to be. (...) It helps as much as it harms. Examining the meaning, history, and value of jealousy, Toohey places the emotion at the core of modern culture, creativity, and civilization—not merely the sexual relationship. His eclectic approach weaves together psychology, art and literature, neuroscience, anthropology, and a host of other disciplines to offer fresh and intriguing contemporary perspectives on violence, the family, the workplace, animal behavior, and psychopathology. Ranging from the streets of London to Pacific islands, and from the classical world to today, this is an elegant, smart, and beautifully illustrated defense of a not-always-deadly sin. (shrink)

Jealousy is an emotion that arises in diverse circumstances and is experienced in phenomenologically diverse ways. In part because of this diversity, evaluations of jealous subjects tend to be conflicting and ambiguous. Thus philosophers who are interested in the moral status of jealousy face a challenge: to explain how, despite the diversity of jealous subjects and experiences of jealousy, our moral evaluations of those subjects in light of those experiences might be unified. In this project, I confront and respond to (...) this challenge, which I call the challenge of heterogeneity. -/- In Part I, I refine and expand on existing descriptive accounts of jealousy, defending an account with three necessary but not sufficient conditions. On my view, if one is jealous: -/- A. One desires that oneself stand in some relation to a specific, non-replicable good. B. One has in mind a (possibly imagined) rival and regards the rival’s having the good as logically or causally inconsistent with the satisfaction of this desire C. One has in mind some (possibly imagined) set of circumstances in which this desire would be satisfied. -/- In discussing this view I emphasize the role that relationships play in giving rise to jealousy, since its connections to relationships make jealousy descriptively and normatively unique. -/- In Part II, I develop an account of jealousy’s moral significance. To do so, I divide cases of jealousy into three types: those involving jealous desires relating to (1) caring relationships, (2) non-caring relationships, and (3) material goods or personal qualities. I argue that in all three types of cases, jealousy undermines the actual or potential moral value of the jealous subjects’ relationships, and that this undermining provides the paradigmatic moral reason to criticize jealous subjects. Thus I respond to the challenge of heterogeneity without simply portraying jealous subjects as selfish or insecure. -/- After doing so, I consider multiple arguments for the claim that a person’s being jealous sometimes constitutes a moral reason to praise that person. I critique each of those arguments and conclude that we have good reasons to see jealous subjects as worthy of moral criticism but not moral praise. (shrink)

This paper argues that an essential and often overlooked feature of jealousy is the sense that one is entitled to the affirmation provided by the love relationship. By turning to Sartre's and Beauvoir's analyses of love and its distortions, I will show how the public nature of identity can inhibit the possibility of genuine love. Since we must depend on the freedom of others to show us who we are, the uncertainty this introduces into one's sense of self can trigger (...) anxiety and pathological attempts to control those others upon whom one's self-value depends. In jealousy one tries to possess the other person's freedom in the hopes that a constant positive evaluation can be thereby secured. The belief that one is entitled to the self-perfection that such affirmation promises reveals both the important existential role that the beloved plays in the jealous person's psychic structure and the manner in which gender inequalities can promote such distortions of love. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s first major work, L’Invitée ( She Came to Stay ), in order to reveal the text as a vital place of origin for feminist phenomenological philosophy. My reading of L’Invitée departs from most scholarly interpretations of the text in three notable respects: (1) it is inclusive of the “two unpublished chapters” that were excised from the original manuscript at the publisher’s request, (2) it takes seriously Beauvoir’s claim that (...) phenomenological philosophy is often better expressed in novels than essays or treatises, and (3) it views the novel’s main characters, Françoise and Xavière, as one woman who has multiple, contradictory, excessive selves. Thus approached, L’Invitée provides us with a thick description of one woman’s embodied consciousness and thereby shows us with specificity what a consciousness whose underlying structures reflect sexual difference looks like. This consciousness not only experiences itself as being both gendered, categorized, disciplined, and defined and in excess of these genders, categories, disciplines, and definitions at the same time, but also experiences its own self-relation through the presence of multiple selves who are each simultaneously attracted to and negating of the other. As such, the defining features of this consciousness involve experiences that I have respectively labeled “ontological multiplicity” and “auto-jealousy.”. (shrink)

Negative emotions are familiar enough, but they have rarely been a topic of study in their own right. This volume brings together fourteen chapters on negative emotions, written in a highly accessible style for non-specialists and specialists alike. It starts with chapters on general issues raised by negative emotions, such as the nature of valence, the theoretical implications of nasty emotions, the role of negative emotions in fiction, as well as the puzzles raised by ambivalent and mixed emotions. The second (...) part of the volume consists of studies of specific emotional phenomena, ranging from the emotion of being moved and the sense of uncanniness to jealousy, hatred, shame, contempt, anxiety, and grief. (shrink)

Previous research suggests that individuals diagnosed with morbid jealousy have jealousy mechanisms that are activated at lower thresholds than individuals with normal jealousy, but that these mechanisms produce behavior that is similar to individuals with normal jealousy. We extended previous research documenting these similarities by investigating sex differences in partner-directed violence committed by individuals diagnosed with morbid jealousy. The results support some of our predictions. For example, a greater percentage of men than women diagnosed with morbid jealousy used physical violence, (...) attempted to kill, and actually killed their partners, and used their hands rather than an object to kill their partners. These results replicate results generated for individuals with normal jealousy. Discussion addresses implications of the current research and highlights directions for future research on the psychology of morbid jealousy. (shrink)

Archer's argument regarding sex differences in partner violence rests on a general account of between-sex differences in reproductive strategies and in social roles. However, men's partner-directed violence often is predicted by perceived risk of female infidelity. We hypothesize that men's partner-directed violence is produced by psychological mechanisms evolved to solve the adaptive problem of paternity uncertainty.

Despite the importance of extrapair copulation (EPC) in human evolution, almost nothing is known about the design features of EPC detection mechanisms. We tested for sex differences in EPC inference-making mechanisms in a sample of 203 young couples. Men made more accurate inferences (φmen = 0.66, φwomen = 0.46), and the ratio of positive errors to negative errors was higher for men than for women (1.22 vs. 0.18). Since some may have been reluctant to admit EPC behavior, we modeled how (...) underreporting could have influenced these results. These analyses indicated that it would take highly sex-differentiated levels of underreporting by subjects with trusting partners for there to be no real sex difference. Further analyses indicated that men may be less willing to harbor unresolved suspicions about their partners’ EPC behavior, which may explain the sex difference in accuracy. Finally, we estimated that women underreported their own EPC behavior (10%) more than men (0%). (shrink)

This book is about love - our ideals of love, our experiences of love, and the fatal consequences of love. A unique collaboration between a leading philosopher in the field of emotions and a social scientist, In The Name of Love presents fascinating insights into romantic love and its future in modern society.

Using data collected from people with at least one brother and one sister, and consistent with an evolutionary perspective, we find that older men and women (a) are more upset by a brother’s partner’s sexual infidelity than by her emotional infidelity and (b) are more upset by a sister’s partner’s emotional infidelity than by his sexual infidelity. There were no effects of participant sex or sex of in-law on upset over a sibling’s partner’s infidelities, but there was an effect of (...) participant sex on reports of upset over one’s own partner’s infidelities. The results suggest that the key variable among older participants is the sex of the sibling or, correspondingly, the sex of the sibling’s partner, as predicted from an evolutionary analysis of reproductive costs, and not the sex of the participant, as predicted from a socialization perspective. Discussion offers directions for future work on jealousy. (shrink)

We describe delusional disorder–jealous type (“morbid jealousy”) with the adaptationist perspective used by Darwinian psychiatrists and evolutionary psychologists to explain the relatively common existence and continued prevalence of mental disorders. We then apply the “harmful dysfunction” analysis to morbid jealousy, including a discussion of this disorder as (1) an end on a continuum of normal jealousy or (2) a discrete entity. (Published Online November 9 2006).

We suggest that morbid jealousy falls on the extreme end of a jealousy continuum. Thus, many features associated with normal jealousy will be present in individuals diagnosed with morbid jealousy. We apply Boyer & Lienard's (B&L's) prediction one (P1; target article, sect. 7.1) to morbid jealousy, suggesting that fitness-related life-cycle dimensions predict sensitivity to cues, and frequency, intensity, and content of intrusive thoughts of partner infidelity. (Published Online February 8 2007).

We live our lives through our emotions, writes Robert Solomon, and it is our emotions that give our lives meaning. What interests or fascinates us, who we love, what angers us, what moves us, what bores us--all of this defines us, gives us character, constitutes who we are. In True to Our Feelings, Solomon illuminates the rich life of the emotions--why we don't really understand them, what they really are, and how they make us human and give meaning to life. (...) Emotions have recently become a highly fashionable area of research in the sciences, with brain imaging uncovering valuable clues as to how we experience our feelings. But while Solomon provides a guide to this cutting-edge research, as well as to what others--philosophers and psychologists--have said on the subject, he also emphasizes the personal and ethical character of our emotions. He shows that emotions are not something that happen to us, nor are they irrational in the literal sense--rather, they are judgements we make about the world, and they are strategies for living in it. Fear, anger, love, guilt, jealousy, compassion--they are all essential to our values, to living happily, healthily, and well. Solomon highlights some of the dramatic ways that emotions fit into our ethics and our sense of the good life, how we can make our emotional lives more coherent with our values and be more "true to our feelings" and cultivate emotional integrity. The story of our lives is the story of our passions. We fall in love, we are gripped by scientific curiosity and religious fervor, we fear death and grieve for others, we humble ourselves in envy, jealousy, and resentment. In this remarkable book, Robert Solomon shares his fascination with the emotions and illuminates our passions in an exciting new way. (shrink)

The conceptions of jealousy used by philosophical writers are various, and, this paper suggests, largely inadequate. In particular, the difference between jealousy and envy has not yet been plausibly specified. This paper surveys some past analyses of this distinction and addresses problems with them, before proposing its own positive account of jealousy, developed from an idea of Leila Tov-Ruach(a.k.a. A. O. Rorty). Three conditions for being jealous are proposed and it is shownhow each of them helps to tell the emotion (...) apart from some distinct species of envy.It is acknowledged that the referents of the two terms are, to some extent, overlapping,but shown how this overlap is justified by the psychologies of the respective emotions. (shrink)

Young men are more distressed by a partner’s sexual infidelity, whereas young women are more distressed by a partner’s emotional infidelity. The present research investigated (a) whether the sex difference in jealousy replicates in an older sample, and (b) whether younger people differ from older people in their selection of the more distressing infidelity scenario. We presented forced-choice dilemmas to 202 older people (mean age = 67 years) and to 234 younger people (mean age = 20 years). The sex difference (...) replicated in the older sample. In addition, older women were less likely than younger women to select a partner’s emotional infidelity as more distressing than a partner’s sexual infidelity. Discussion offers directions for future work on sex differences and age differences in jealousy. (shrink)

To operationalize the methodological assessment of evolutionary psychology, three requirements are proposed that, if satisfied, would show that a hypothesis is not a just-so story: (1) theoretical entrenchment (i.e., that the hypothesis under consideration is a consequence of a more fundamental theory that is empirically well-confirmed across a very wide range of phenomena), (2) predictive success (i.e., that the hypothesis generates concrete predictions that make it testable and eventually to a certain extent corroborated), and (3) failure of rival explanations (i.e., (...) that crucial and successful predictions attributed to the hypothesis in question cannot be derived from alternative hypotheses). The author argues that the hypothesis about evolutionary sex differences in human jealousy satisfies all three requirements. Key Words: evolutionary psychology • adaptationism • philosophy of science • testability. (shrink)

Different languages present a variety of ways of talking about emotional experience. Very commonly, feelings are described through the use of ¿body image constructions¿ in which they are associated with processes in, or states of, specific body parts. The emotions and the body parts that are thought to be their locus and the kind of activity associated with these body parts vary cross-culturally. This study focuses on the meaning of three ¿body image constructions¿ used to describe feelings similar to, but (...) also different from, English ¿jealousy¿, ¿envy¿, and ¿covetousness¿ in the West African language Ewe. It is demonstrated that a ¿moving body¿, a pychologised eye, and red eyes are scripted for these feelings. It is argued that the expressions are not figurative and that their semantics provide good clues to understanding the cultural construction of emotions both emotions and the body. (shrink)

Different languages present a variety of ways of talking about emotional experience. Very commonly, feelings are described through the use of ‘body image constructions’ in which they are associated with processes in, or states of, specific body parts. The emotions and the body parts that are thought to be their locus and the kind of activity associated with these body parts vary cross-culturally. This study focuses on the meaning of three ‘body image constructions’ used to describe feelings similar to, but (...) also different from, English ‘jealousy’, ‘envy’, and ‘covetousness’ in the West African language Ewe. It is demonstrated that a ‘moving body’, a pychologised eye, and red eyes are scripted for these feelings. It is argued that the expressions are not figurative and that their semantics provide good clues to understanding the cultural construction of emotions both emotions and the body. (shrink)