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Envy is a painful emotion that arises when you want something another person has, such as their possessions, qualities, or achievements, and feel discontent or resentment about the gap. Psychology does not treat it as always malicious or always harmful. Researchers still disagree about its forms and effects, and the strongest findings depend on how envy is defined and measured.
What envy means in psychology
The American Psychological Association’s APA Dictionary of Psychology entry “Envy,” last updated April 19, 2018, defines it as:
“a negative emotion of discontent and resentment generated by desire for the possessions, attributes, qualities, or achievements of another (the target of the envy).”
A 2007 review by Richard H. Smith and Sung Hee Kim, published in Psychological Bulletin, describes envy as an unpleasant, often painful emotion involving feelings of inferiority, hostility, and resentment. It is triggered by awareness that another person or group enjoys an attribute you desire. That review also notes a long-running definitional question: whether envy “proper,” which contains hostile feelings, should be separated from benign envy, which does not.
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Envy and jealousy are not the same thing
The two words are often used interchangeably in everyday speech, but psychologists usually separate them. The APA dictionary draws the line by the number of people involved: envy may involve two people, while jealousy involves three. The distinction works as a concise conceptual guide, not as a rule that every speaker follows.
| Feature | Envy | Jealousy |
|---|---|---|
| People involved (APA Dictionary of Psychology) | May involve two people: you and the person who has the advantage | Involves three people |
| Typical focus | A desirable possession, attribute, quality, or achievement held by someone else | A threatened relationship or valued bond involving a third party |
Because ordinary usage and translations overlap, a reader may see one word used for both feelings. Biblical translations, discussed below, are one example.
Why researchers disagree about envy
There is no single accepted model of envy. Lange, Weidman, and Crusius, writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2018, describe three competing accounts:
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Malicious envy
This account treats envy as uniformly malicious: the envious person wants the advantaged person to lose what they have, or feels hostility toward them.
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This account holds that envy can take benign and malicious forms. Benign envy motivates a person to pursue what the other person has, while malicious envy involves hostility or a wish for the other person’s loss.
Pain theory
This account emphasizes that envy is a painful emotion, whatever it leads a person to do next. It does not require hostility to define envy.
These accounts make different assumptions about whether hostility is essential to envy and whether benign and malicious envy are distinct forms or simply different responses to the same painful comparison. Researchers test these assumptions in different ways, so the field has not settled the question.
The link with schadenfreude depends on measurement
Schadenfreude is pleasure at another person’s misfortune. Lange, Weidman, and Crusius’s 2018 meta-analysis, which included 4,366 participants across the underlying studies, found that envy and schadenfreude were more strongly and positively correlated when envy was measured as malicious than when it was measured as pain or as benign envy.
That result describes how the relationship changes with measurement. It does not show that every envious person feels schadenfreude, and it does not establish that envy causes it.
Can envy be constructive?
Whether envy can help is an open question. An APA Speaking of Psychology episode titled “Can envy be good for you?” discusses how researchers and philosophers have reconsidered the assumption that envy is always destructive. Its guests were psychologist Jens Lange and philosopher Sara Protasi. The episode presents this as a live discussion, not as settled clinical advice.
If you want to examine your own envy, a practical starting point is to name the advantage you notice in someone else and then separate two responses: wanting to develop something similar for yourself, and wanting the other person to lose what they have. The first is closer to the aspiration that benign-envy accounts describe. The second is closer to the hostility emphasized in malicious-envy accounts. This is a reflection prompt, not a tested intervention. The sources reviewed here do not establish that it reduces envy or improves outcomes.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Envy in religious and literary traditions
Psychology is not the only framework for envy. Bible Gateway’s Encyclopedia of the Bible entry “Envy” notes that biblical terminology can overlap among envy, jealousy, zeal, and related meanings, that context determines which sense applies, and that biblical texts include both examples and warnings. This is a religious-textual tradition, not a universal psychological account.
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An Oxford Academic chapter abstract, “Envy in Jewish Thought and Literature,” in the 2008 volume Envy: Theory and Research, describes envy in biblical and post-biblical rabbinic writing and compares Jewish traditions with Christian teachings. The abstract treats envy and jealousy as related but distinct. It points to the chapter’s full argument rather than summarizing it.
Further reading
Envy: Theory and Research, edited by Richard H. Smith and published by Oxford University Press in 2008, is an academic collection. Oxford Academic describes it as interdisciplinary, covering theological, philosophical, evolutionary, social psychological, organizational, experimental economics, marketing, neuroscience, anthropology, and health perspectives. It is a scholarly resource rather than a self-help guide.
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