Cross-Cultural Comparisons of Nouns Associated With Jealousy and the Related Emotions of Envy, Anger, and Fear

Abstract

To determine cross-cultural variations in associative meaning, 389 males and females in Germany, Russia, and the United States rated nouns for their degree of association with the concepts of jealousy, envy, anger, and fear. The findings touched on several issues. Re garding the conceptual distinction between jealousy and envy, the associations overlapped strongly in the United States, somewhat in Germany, and not at all in Russia. In agreement with scholars who posit that jealousy is a combination of anger and fear, we found that jealousy overlapped with anger in three nations and with fear in two nations. But the overlap was far less than that between anger and fear. Evidence for the proposal that anger and fear are more firmly rooted in the biological heritage of human beings than are jealousy and envy was inconclusive. Predictions drawn from tax onomy and prototype models that anger, envy, and jealousy would have similar associations but that each emotion would differ from fear were not supported.