So what are envy and jealousy? I mean people sometimes use them almost

interchangeably but in fact from a psychological perspective they

actually mean very very particular states.

Envy is wanting another success, money, skills, attributes.

Very often it's accompanied by a feeling of resentment, believing that somebody has come about these successes, money,

skills and advantages unfairly.

They were given some advantage that we don't have.

And these, by the way, and I'll be talking about this, it's very related to another psychological

tendency called idealization,

which is idealizing other people believing that they are always happy, peaceful, joyous, confident, and wanting to have what they have.

But idealization doesn't have the resentment of envy.

It's simply idolizing someone believing that they have a kind of saint-like

perfect stature where they don't feel some of the negative emotional activations that we feel.

Jealousy is fearing the loss of a beloved, generally someone that we have a significant relationship with,

due to an interloper, somebody else appearing and taking away the beloved from us.

So a child can feel jealous of a sibling or somebody in a sexual or romantic partnership could certainly feel jealous of a competitor for the affections of someone they're interested in.

So, both envy and jealousy and in fact idealization are in essence known as secondary emotions and they are

subsets of a primary emotion which is shame. What is shame? Well, shame is a emotional state that arises when we feel insecurely connected to a tribe, a group, a family, a larger community.

Human beings are packed animals and we get our sense of security, our sense of validation.

All of our positive emotions arise from feeling securely connected

to other people.

There's a work by a neuroscientist named Matthew Lieberman called Social and he wrote a book summarizing all of his

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