Friendships can foster happiness, health, and reproductive fitness. However, friendships end-even when we might not want them to. A primary reason for this is interference from third parties. Yet, little work has explored how people meet the challenge of maintaining friendships in the face of real or perceived threats from third parties, as when our friends inevitably make new friends or form new romantic relationships. In contrast to earlier conceptualizations from developmental research, which viewed friendship jealousy as solely maladaptive, we propose that friendship jealousy is one overlooked tool of friendship maintenance. We derive and test-via a series of 11 studies (N = 2,918) using hypothetical scenarios, recalled real-world events, and manipulation of online emotional experiences-whether friendship jealousy possesses the features of a tool well-designed to help us retain friends in the face of third-party threats. Consistent with our proposition, findings suggest that friendship jealousy is (a) uniquely evoked by third-party threats to friendships (but not the prospective loss of the friendship alone), (b) sensitive to the value of the threatened friendship, (c) strongly calibrated to cues that one is being replaced, even over more intuitive cues (e.g., the amount of time a friend and interloper spend together), and (d) ultimately motivates behavior aimed at countering third-party threats to friendship ("friend guarding"). Even as friendship jealousy may be negative to experience, it may include features designed for beneficial-and arguably prosocial-ends: to help maintain friendships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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友谊嫉妒：面对第三方威胁，保持友谊的一种工具？

友谊可以促进幸福，健康和生殖健康。但是，即使我们可能不希望友谊结束，友谊也会结束。主要原因是来自第三方的干扰。然而，很少有工作探索人们如何面对面对来自第三方的真实或可感知的威胁时保持友谊的挑战，例如当我们的朋友不可避免地结交新朋友或建立新的恋爱关系时。与早期的发展研究概念化相反，后者将友善嫉妒视为完全不适应，我们建议友善嫉妒是维持友善的一种被忽视的工具。我们使用假设情景，回忆的真实事件，通过11项研究（N = 2,918）进行了一系列推论和测试，和在线情感体验的操纵-嫉妒是否具有精心设计的工具的功能，可以帮助我们在面对第三方威胁时留住朋友。与我们的主张一致，研究结果表明，友谊嫉妒是（a）第三方威胁友情的唯一原因（而不是仅因友情的预期损失），（b）对威胁友情的价值敏感，（c）严格校准，以提示被替换的线索，甚至是更直观的线索（例如，朋友和闯入者在一起的时间），以及（d）最终激发旨在抵抗第三方威胁友谊的行为（“保护朋友”） ”）。即使友情嫉妒对体验不利，但它可能包括为有利的和可能的亲社会目的而设计的功能：帮助维持友谊。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2020 APA，保留所有权利）。