To determine cross-cultural variations in associative meaning, 389
males and females in Germany, Russia, and the United States rated
nouns for their degree of association with the concepts of jealousy,
envy, anger, and fear. The findings touched on several issues. Re
garding the conceptual distinction between jealousy and envy, the
associations overlapped strongly in the United States, somewhat in
Germany, and not at all in Russia. In agreement with scholars who
posit that jealousy is a combination of anger and fear, we found that
jealousy overlapped with anger in three nations and with fear in
two nations. But the overlap was far less than that between anger
and fear. Evidence for the proposal that anger and fear are more
firmly rooted in the biological heritage of human beings than are
jealousy and envy was inconclusive. Predictions drawn from tax
onomy and prototype models that anger, envy, and jealousy would
have similar associations but that each emotion would differ from
fear were not supported.
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