Despite its ubiquity and long history of being reflected upon by theologians, philosophers, poets, and psychotherapists, the topic of jealousy has only recently come to the attention of social and cognitive scientists. During the 1970s social and clinical psychologists offered frameworks that were geared largely to examining and resolving jealousy as a hindrance to love relationships, self-definition, and culture. Around the same time, main-stream theories of emotional development suggested that jealousy could not emerge before the child was well into her second year of life because this response depends on cognitive processes (such as, self-awareness, self-consciousness) that are not available before that time. As a result, treatments within the field of developmental psychology dealt with presentations subsequent to infancy and were generally limited to focusing on sibling relationships as an arena in which jealousy detracted from healthy child and family functioning.Though stimulating, these earlier lines of research have been challenged. Adult studies have been limited by reliance on self-report measures, those using siblings have been impeded by reliance on naturalistic methods, and all have been hampered by ethical concerns leading to issues with regard to validity. Moreover, within frameworks in which jealousy has been conceptualized as problematic, studies often have been designed with the aim of determining under which conditions its expression and negative impact can be mitigated. Such concerns have tended to overshadow considerations of the more basic issue - how jealousy develops.The main aim of the present edited volume, Handbook of the Development of Jealousy , is to provide an informative and integrated picture of this new area of research, and to provide a forum for discussing implications of the findings for theories of emotional and socio-cognitive development. This interdisciplinary compilation of approximately twenty chapters and four commentaries will chart the process by which jealousy unfolds and will explore familial, cultural, cognitive and biological factors that drive its developmental trajectory. It will also include chapters which help place these results within social and cultural contexts and within scholarly literatures beyond psychology.In sum, the questions the authors of this volume are addressing have been stimulated by recent empirical advances in developmental psychology. They will include empirical papers based on new discoveries which have not been published previously, or present novel and intriguing theoretical papers and commentaries that address factors which influence or help explain jealousy’s appearance and meaning, while integrating new findings within extant literature and carving out new questions for stimulating further research.The chapters will draw from the psychological literature on emotion, personality, socio-emotional and cognitive development during childhood and adulthood, parenting, developmental psychopathology, social, and evolutionary psychology, as well as sociology, history, and zoology. The book that is being proposed will not only have broad appeal to scholars in each of these areas, but will also serve as an invaluable resource to workers in applied disciplines, including clinical psychology, psychiatry, and social work.
