We review the jealousy literature and present our Dynamic Functional Model of Jealousy, which argues that jealousy evolved and has its own unique motivational state aimed at preventing others from usurping important relationships. It has a core form that exists in infants and nonhuman animals and an elaborated form in humans that emerges as cognitive sophistication develops. The DFMJ proposes that jealousy is an unfolding process with early and late phases that can be differentially impacted by relationship and personality factors. (...) It also notes the importance of looking at multiple concomitants of jealousy, including action tendencies. We discuss how jealousy fits with current emotion theories and suggest that theories of specific emotions need to be broadened. (shrink)

In reply to the commentaries of Clay-Warner (2014), Gendolla (2014), Nesse (2014), Shweder (2014), and Zachar (2014), I repeat the essential features of appraisal theories of the second flavor: They take emotional components (and not specific emotions) as the phenomenon to be explained, and they strive for a multilevel mechanistic explanation that leaves room for complex and dynamical processes or mechanisms. Every mechanistic explanation starts with an accurate description of regularities between inputs and outputs. Regularities do not preclude context-dependent variety, (...) because there is no limit to the number of input factors that can influence the output, and back. (shrink)