What do you need to do when you are asked to write a paper about jealousy but you have no idea? You do not necessarily have to be jealous or have to have gone through an experience with jealousy in the past for you to be able to write this paper. As a matter of fact, this is a paper that does not require your personal feelings, but an objective discussion into jealousy.
Do you use jealousy as a theme in your stories? Do you have any tips for crafting jealous characters? Who is your favourite jealous character of all time? What is your favourite movie/series/book that has a jealous character? Let me know by commenting below!
creative essay on jealousy
Benjamin Schaefer is a writer and editor from upstate New York. He studied literature and creative writing at Bard College and at the MFA program at the University of Arizona. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Electric Literature, Guernica, Literary Hub, and The Southern Review, and he is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, MacDowell, Millay Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He serves as the senior prose editor at Fairy Tale Review.
Intense jealousy is often a manifestation of anxiety. If that seems like it could be the case for you, unpack it. Identify and examine what triggers your anxieties, and equip yourself to address or avoid them. (Pro tip: If you have access to good mental health care, a therapist can really help.)
Put your jealousy to good use by paying close to attention to what it shows you about what you really want. Turn envy into clarity by using jealous moments to get specific about your creative and career aspirations. Delineate your dreams, both short- and long-term, and break them into small, specific, achievable goals and action points. Work toward them. Keep going.
Follow the lead of author Roxane Gay and allow yourself a secret nemesis (preferably someone outside your circle). Make a cartoon villain of them in your head, and be gleeful about their failures while shaking your fist at their accomplishments. Let the imagined competition rile you up, push you creatively, and inspire you to make bigger, bolder, more daring leaps. Write to win. When your nemesis shines, write harder.
Her anger was increasing step by step. The sound of her spiked high heels ticked with the seconds of her watch. Obsessed, she had been alienated from any other thought. Her mind spun, jealousy tore at her whole being.
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.[1]
Jealousy is a typical experience in human relationships, and it has been observed in infants as young as five months.[2][3][4][5] Some researchers claim that jealousy is seen in all cultures and is a universal trait.[6][7][8] However, others claim jealousy is a culture-specific emotion.[9]
Jealousy can either be suspicious or reactive,[10] 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.[11] 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.[12] Biologists have identified factors that may unconsciously influence the expression of jealousy.[13]
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 ζήλος (zēlos), sometimes "jealousy", but more often in a positive sense "emulation, ardour, zeal"[14][15] (with a root connoting "to boil, ferment"; or "yeast").[citation needed] The "biblical language" zeal would be known as "tolerating no unfaithfulness" while in middle English zealous is good.[16] One origin word gelus meant "Possessive and suspicious" the word then turned into jelus.[16]
People do not express jealousy through a single emotion or a single behavior.[18][19][20]They instead express jealousy through diverse emotions and behaviors, which makes it difficult to form a scientific definition of jealousy. Scientists instead define it in their own words, as illustrated by the following examples:
These definitions of jealousy share two basic themes. First, all the definitions imply a triad composed of a jealous individual, a partner, and a perception of a third party or rival. Second, all the definitions describe jealousy as a reaction to a perceived threat to the relationship between two people, or a dyad. Jealous reactions typically involve aversive emotions and/or behaviors that are assumed to be protective for their attachment relationships. These themes form the essential meaning of jealousy in most scientific studies.
Popular culture uses the word jealousy as a synonym for envy. Many dictionary definitions include a reference to envy or envious feelings. In fact, the overlapping use of jealousy and envy has a long history.
The terms are used indiscriminately in such popular 'feelgood' books as Nancy Friday's Jealousy, where the expression 'jealousy' applies to a broad range of passions, from envy to lust and greed. While this kind of usage blurs the boundaries between categories that are intellectually valuable and psychologically justifiable, such confusion is understandable in that historical explorations of the term indicate that these boundaries have long posed problems. Margot Grzywacz's fascinating etymological survey of the word in Romance and Germanic languages[26] asserts, indeed, that the concept was one of those that proved to be the most difficult to express in language and was therefore among the last to find an unambiguous term. Classical Latin used invidia, without strictly differentiating between envy and jealousy. It was not until the postclassical era that Latin borrowed the late and poetic Greek word zelotypia and the associated adjective zelosus. It is from this adjective that are derived French jaloux, Provençal gelos, Italian geloso, and Spanish celoso.[27]
Although popular culture often uses jealousy and envy as synonyms, modern philosophers and psychologists have argued for conceptual distinctions between jealousy and envy. For example, philosopher John Rawls[31] distinguishes between jealousy and envy on the ground that jealousy involves the wish to keep what one has, and envy the wish to get what one does not have. Thus, a child is jealous of her parents' attention to a sibling, but envious of her friend's new bicycle. Psychologists Laura Guerrero and Peter Andersen have proposed the same distinction.[32] They claim the jealous person "perceives that he or she possesses a valued relationship, but is in danger of losing it or at least of having it altered in an undesirable manner," whereas the envious person "does not possess a valued commodity, but wishes to possess it." Gerrod Parrott draws attention to the distinct thoughts and feelings that occur in jealousy and envy.[33][34]
Parrott acknowledges that people can experience envy and jealousy at the same time. Feelings of envy about a rival can even intensify the experience of jealousy.[35] Still, the differences between envy and jealousy in terms of thoughts and feelings justify their distinction in philosophy and science.
Jealousy involves an entire "emotional episode," including a complex "narrative", which are the circumstances that lead up to jealousy, jealousy itself as emotion, any attempt at self regulation, subsequent actions and events and the resolution of the episode. The narrative can originate from experienced facts, thoughts, perceptions, memories, but also imagination, guesses and assumptions. The more society and culture matter in the formation of these factors, the more jealousy can have a social and cultural origin. By contrast, jealousy can be a "cognitively impenetrable state", where education and rational belief matter very little.[36]
One possible explanation of the origin of jealousy in evolutionary psychology is that the emotion evolved in order to maximize the success of our genes: it is a biologically based emotion selected to foster the certainty about the paternity of one's own offspring. A jealous behavior, in Woman, is directed into avoiding sexual betrayal and a consequent waste of resources and effort in taking care of someone else's offspring.[37] There are, additionally, cultural or social explanations of the origin of jealousy. According to one, the narrative from which jealousy arises can be in great part made by the imagination. Imagination is strongly affected by a person's cultural milieu. The pattern of reasoning, the way one perceives situations, depends strongly on cultural context. It has elsewhere been suggested that jealousy is in fact a secondary emotion in reaction to one's needs not being met, be those needs for attachment, attention, reassurance or any other form of care that would be otherwise expected to arise from that primary romantic relationship.
While mainstream psychology considers sexual arousal through jealousy a paraphilia, some authors on sexuality have argued that jealousy in manageable dimensions can have a definite positive effect on sexual function and sexual satisfaction. Studies have also shown that jealousy sometimes heightens passion towards partners and increases the intensity of passionate sex.[38][39] 2ff7e9595c
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