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Envy and Jealousy

Semantic Problems and Experiential Distinctions

Boston University

Sung Hee Kim

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

W. Gerrod Parrott

Georgetown University

Although traditional scholarly views suggest that envy and jealousy produce distinct affective experiences, empirical work is contradictory. The present study treated this problem from both semantic and experiential perspectives. First, subjects described situations in which they had felt strong envy and strong jealousy. These descriptions were coded for whether they conformed to traditional definitions of the two emotions. The results demonstrated that although the words envy and jealousy have overlapping meanings, the source of this overlap is the broad meaning of the word jealousy. Whereas the word jealousy may denote either jealousy (romantic jealousy, most commonly) or envy, the word envy will tend to be used in one sense alone, as a social-comparison-based emotion. In the second part of the study, subjects indicated for a series of affective states whether each was more characteristic of strong envy or strong jealousy. The results suggested that each emotion is associated with a differing profile of feelings. Reasons for the discrepancy between these results and previous empirical work are discussed.

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