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Concept
Jealousy
Summary
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.
The word stems from the French jalousie, formed from jaloux (jealous), and further from Low Latin zelosus (full of zeal), in turn from the Greek word ζῆλος (zēlos), sometimes "jealousy", but more often in a positive sense "emulation, ardour, zeal" (with a root connoting "to boil, ferment"; or "yeast"). The "biblical language" zeal would be known as "tolerating no unfaithfulness" while in middle English zealous is good.
Official source
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Related courses (1)
HUM-275: Evolutionary psychology
La psychologie évolutionniste est une discipline située au carrefour de la biologie, de la psychologie, de l'anthropologie, des sciences sociales et naturelles qui examine les traits psychologiques et
Related lectures (1)
Sexual Conflicts: Evolutionary Perspectives
Delves into sexual conflicts between genders from an evolutionary standpoint, covering topics such as jealousy, infidelity, and partner retention.
Related publications (1)
Neural Decoding of Discriminative Auditory Object Features Depends on Their Socio-Affective Valence
Melissa Saenz, Wietske Van der Zwaag
Human voices consist of specific patterns of acoustic features that are considerably enhanced during affective vocalizations. These acoustic features are presumably used by listeners to accurately discriminate between acoustically or emotionally similar vo ...
Oxford University Press (OUP)2016Related concepts (8)
Envy
Envy is an emotion which occurs when a person lacks another's quality, skill, achievement, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it. Aristotle defined envy as pain at the sight of another's good fortune, stirred by "those who have what we ought to have". Bertrand Russell said that envy was one of the most potent causes of unhappiness. Recent research considered the conditions under which it occurs, how people deal with it, and whether it can inspire people to emulate those they envy.
Suffering
Suffering, or pain in a broad sense, may be an experience of unpleasantness or aversion, possibly associated with the perception of harm or threat of harm in an individual. Suffering is the basic element that makes up the negative valence of affective phenomena. The opposite of suffering is pleasure or happiness. Suffering is often categorized as physical or mental. It may come in all degrees of intensity, from mild to intolerable. Factors of duration and frequency of occurrence usually compound that of intensity.
Sexual jealousy
Sexual jealousy is a special form of jealousy in sexual relationships, based on suspected or imminent sexual infidelity. The concept is studied in the field of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that there is a gender difference in sexual jealousy, driven by men and women's different reproductive biology. The theory proposes that a man perceives a threat to his relationship's future because he could be fooled into raising children that are not his own.