Saturday, January 07, 2006

Jealousy

Are you a jealous person? You keep telling yourself no, of course not. Why would you be? You have nothing to be jealous about. Jealousy is such a weak and unnecessary emotion. Could you be a jealous creature?
Surely not.

Oh, but you are. Even if you're the nicest person on earth. Even when you do a good deed a day. You could experience jealousy. It's a dangerous thing, jealousy is. It could blind your vision, destroy you. Make you feel pain, unnecessary hatred.

In terms of social psychology, Rock and Murphy (1971) explains jealousy as "The perception that a person whose evaluation matters a great deal to us prefers someone else can make us doubt our own worth."

This is precisely evident for the people who do not believe in themselves. So are you jealous?
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5 comments:

Raven Hope said...

hmmm... Interesting thought. To be honest, I always thought that jealousy is milder version of envy... I thought jealousy is something like you want something that that person has such as fame and money. Yet, jealousy might be some sort of 'justice' within the person.... For example, of all of the rich people, you are only jealous of one because of

(1) you want to be rich too
(2) you found out that that person got rich without needing to work hard or did it using dirty method.

After saying much, I am not sure about jealousy and envy concepts anymore. Is there any difference between the two?

January 08, 2006 2:50 am
patienthelen^ said...

hey.. i read somewhere.. jealousy happens when you want to keep something you already have i.e. when a threat poses to take it away, but envy is wanting what you don't have.

heh.. what do u think?

January 08, 2006 6:53 pm
Raven Hope said...

Hmmm.... Let me think... It kind of make sense that jealousy is in a way wanting to protect one's pride, while envy is wanting something that one doesn't have or couldn't achieve.

Gosh, that reminds me of old classroom politics and romantic drama! I still remember how a friend was jealous of another because of the exam marks! Also, you know how like in tv dramas, the girl deliberately become 'close' to another fellow so to make her boyfriend jealous!

Speaking of envy, I suppose the reason why I heard that envy is a more dangerous level than jealous is that what you had originally is really GONE. For instance, you used to be first in class until someone comes and grabs it from you. At first, you were jealous and so you try means and ways to get the number one. However, no matter how hard you try, it turns out that your brain is not as fascinating as that person, so the jealousy becomes envy.

Well, that's what I can think of from what you said.... what do you think of it?

It looks like I'm clogging up your blog. It's an interesting discussion, especially since took those two concepts are easily taken for granted.... :p

January 12, 2006 12:22 am
patienthelen^ said...

heh.. it's ok.. this IS interesting. I used to think that both jealousy and envy are the same.

I think another important thing about jealousy is, wanting to keep something which you think SHOULD be yours, but someone threatens to take it away.

That's jealousy at a dangerous level. What do you think? :D

January 12, 2006 1:59 am
Raven Hope said...

Hmmm... Could it mean that jealousy can be worse than envy if that were the case? Come to think of it, I think in a sense that jealousy/envy is a aggressive emotion of wanting/keeping something. The only difference between the two is as mentioned earlier, depending on you had, have it or not.

January 15, 2006 11:33 am

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