Envy is a particular feeling or emotion. The same etymological Latin origin of the term indicates that at the base there is a strong relationship with visual attention. But also in other languages, for example in the Slavic or Russian language, there is a strong appeal to the attitude of someone who is looking at another person.
In short, envy is to look at people who have succeeded with negative feelings, just think that even the great philosopher Bacon took up the same concept by linking it to the traditional superstition that defines "evil eye" the negative look of people who envy others.
Is envy, therefore, a totally negative feeling? The answer, which comes to us from scientists is no. Numerous experiments carried out at the University of Cologne in Germany by some scholars, including prof. Jan Crusius, confirmed that envy is a "double-sided" feeling, as it contains both positive and negative aspects depending on how the people who are subject react to it.
There is a form of harmful envy that is directed above all towards people who are the object of envy, with the intention of causing them harm or favoring a reduction in their social position, and a benign form that instead activates a strong feeling of motivation that leads to improve yourself trying to commit to reach or get close to the positions occupied by envied people.
According to other researchers (Tai, Narayanan, McAllister), dividing the emotion into benign and malignant, however, can be misleading because, at the bottom of the base there is always a single emotion that arises as a response to the pain experienced in the face of the fortune of another person .
Thus, the same subject can respond to this emotion with different attitudes. In other words, it is not certain that whoever shows benign envy will then be immune from the malign one. These scholars also define benign envy as challenge-oriented (which favors a positive stimulus and benign reactions); while malignant envy is one oriented to the threat (which results in harmful actions aimed at damaging the envied person).
However it is, it is important that every person faced with this kind of emotion carries out a careful introspective analysis . Do not be afraid, that is, to walk within yourself and your thoughts this feeling that can also be upsetting but which, once explored, can make us stronger and freer. One of the techniques to succeed is that of cognitive defusion, but we will talk about it again.
