Jealousy and Envy

Human emotions are socially constructed (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Emotions are shaped by social processes and social forces. Emotions are social as well as psychological phenomena, responses to social situations that are shaped by social learning. However useful it may be to consider emotions as physiological or as psychological events, the sociological study of emotions draws attention to often-overlooked social aspects of emotions, including the situations that provoke them, the social learning by which they are shaped, their historical and cross-cultural variability, their social usefulness, their contribution to social conflict, and the social arrangements that humans set up to manage them. To paraphrase Mills (1959), the private emotions of individuals are shaped by public issues of social structure. Emotions are shaped by society. Private experiences of emotion are embedded in history, culture, and social structure. Not only our feelings, but also our feelings about our feelings are shaped by psychological, philosophical, and theological frameworks that are institutionalized in social life. Thus, patterns of emotional experience change in response to changes in society and culture. Emotions cannot be fully understood without some attention to the social forces that influence them. Emotions reflect the norms, attitudes, and values of groups as well as individuals; they are useful and dangerous for groups as well as individuals. As Collins (1975:92) observed, it is through emotional behavior that humans "exercise power, create religions and works of art. . . and enact bonds of solidarity among family and friends." Shalin (2004) argues that politics is fueled by emotions, economics feeds on moral feelings, and democracy is an embodied process that binds affectively as well as rhetorically. Emotions are shaped by the beliefs, attitudes, and values that individuals acquire in the course of their socialization. The experience and expression of emotions depend on what one "knows," what one believes to be true. The private experience of love depends in part on beliefs about sex and its social regulation. The private experience of jealousy depends in part on beliefs about