Jealousy
emotion referring to the thoughts and feelings of insecurity, fear, and envy over relative lack of possessions, status or something of great personal value
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.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Jealousy” as emotion referring to the thoughts and feelings of insecurity, fear, and envy over relative lack of possessions, status or something of great personal value. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as emotion referring to the thoughts and feelings of insecurity, fear, and envy over relative lack of possessions, status or something of great personal value. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6545811. The Library of Congress control number is sh85069852. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jealousy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.