Social media, jealousy, and romantic relationships

This chapter focuses on the role social media can play in eliciting jealousy in romantic relationships. First, I define the term “jealousy” and describe the dynamic functional model of jealousy by Chung and Harris (2018) that is used as an overarching framework in the chapter. Subsequently, I discuss how the affordances of social media can influence the elicitation and manifestation of jealousy, for example by increasing the perceived number of potential rivals and threat appraisals. In the next section, I present data on the prevalence of social media induced jealousy and empirical data on influencing factors as well consequences of social media induced jealousy. Individual differences in traits, like trait jealousy, self-esteem, need for popularity, or attachment style also influence the experience of social media induced jealousy, which is in turn related to lower relationship satisfaction. After pointing out several methodological issues, I discuss practical implications of the findings and research gaps that should be addressed in future research.