Envy Affects The Undergraduates’ Attentional Network

There are always people around us who are better off than we are.They might have higher grades, be richer, or have more chances to bepromoted. Usually when we are faced with this kind of upward socialcontrast, we will feel envy. In1949, Sayer posited the idea that thereare probably two facets of envy: one is the positive facet whichpushes people to develop themselves, and the other is the negativefacet which makes it more difficult for us to be successful. The formeris called benign envy, and the latter is called malicious envy.According to Attentional Network Theory, attention can be dividedinto three independent functional components: alerting, orienting andexecutive control. Jin Fan et al. designed the attentional network testto test the individual attentional components.Research into the relationship between emotion and attention hasbeen very popular in emotional psychology in recent years, but thereare still some limitations. For example, the results of research are stilltoo general, and there is very little research on benign envy.Furthermore, there is very little research using the attentionalnetwork to study the relationship between emotion and attention.We are trying to find out whether–where envy occurs amongundergraduates-the differences between the two facets of envy arequalitative. Furthermore, we want to determine whether there aresignificant attentional differences between subjects in the benignenvious condition group, the malicious envious condition group andthe control group.The subjects were randomly separated into three conditions inexperiment1. The participants in the envious group spent fifteenminutes recalling their personal envious experience and writing themdown, while those in the control group spent fifteen minutes recallingand recording that day’s experiences (like writing a diary). The resultsshow: firstly, the valence of the malicious envy among the threeemotion conditions is significant, whereas it isn’t applied to benign envy. Secondly, the difficulty in recalling individuals’ experiencesbetween the three groups is different. Also, after setting the valenceof the malicious envy as a covariant, the malicious envy of thesubjects coming from three conditions is statistically significant in5dimensions.We used the same method to elicit envy in Experiment2. Thosewho finished emotional tasks would click the mouse to complete theemotional rating questions and then they would continue to thefollowing experiment. The overall design of Experiment2was a3x3mixed experimental design (emotion conditions: malicious envy,benign envy, control; Attentional Networks: alerting, orienting andexecutive control). We set the emotion condition as abetween-subject variable, the attentional network as a within-subjectvariable, and the reaction time and the correct rate as dependentvariable. The results demonstrate that: firstly, there is not significantinteraction between the emotion condition and the attentionalnetwork-there are main effects on the emotion condition and theattentional network. Secondly, we find statistical differences fororienting and executive control, but not for alerting. Thirdly, in theexperiment when the subjects were to identify arrows’ directions ascongruent, incongruent or neutral, the malicious envy group’sreaction time was longer than the reaction times of the other groups.Moreover, there is significant interaction between the participants’sex and their attentional network: female participants’ executivecontrol efficiency is higher than that of the male participants. Finally,there is statistical interaction between the subjects’ majors and theirattentional network: arts students’ orienting and executive controlefficiency are remarkably higher than those of science students.