Abstract
Jealousy. Lay people have a rich and structured knowledge about jealousy, and this knowledge is similar in complexity to that which people have about so called "basic" emotions. The main spontaneous responses to jealousy situations were behaviours and emotional states; cognitions were more important when we asked about suitable reactions; physiological changes were always the least frequent. The weight of these general components and their specific strategies associated with them depended on: sex, the seriousness of the jealousy antecedent, how people conceptualise the experience (attribution to others or to self) and upon whether the question concerned the reaction subjects considered most probable or most suitable for coping with the situation.
