Jealousy

Jealousy is about your own position and envy is about anyone's, which is the distinction the framework maintains and ordinary usage collapses. Jealousy relates to one's own status relative to the group, while envy relates to what is seen as any misplaced advantage, so jealousy requires the other person's rise to threaten you specifically and envy does not. Both are consequences of a structure that ranks, since neither is available where standing is not a scarce quantity assigned by a group. Reading jealousy as fear puts it in the same family as everything else Marsh files under that heading, anticipation of an attack on an anima source, with the source in this case being endogroup status itself. That is a coherent reading given how much of a person's access to anima depends on their standing inside a group. The behavioural difference between the two emotions is the practical part. Envy can result in a longing for vengeance, and jealousy may result in a competitive resolve to do better, which Marsh connects to its Greek root zelos, also the root of zeal. So jealousy motivates effort where envy motivates a demand for restoration, and the same rise in a third person produces striving in one observer and hostility in another depending on whether their own position is at stake.

Psychology draws the same distinction in principle, treating jealousy as a three-party emotion concerning the loss of something one has and envy as a two-party emotion concerning something one lacks, though ordinary speech uses the words interchangeably and researchers regularly note the confusion. Romantic jealousy has its own extensive literature and evolutionary accounts. Marsh's version keeps the structural distinction and re-bases both on group standing rather than on possession, which extends jealousy beyond relationships to any context where status is assigned, and grounds the link to competitive effort through the root the word shares with zeal.