Journal of psychology Vietnam academy of social sciences

Abstract

Envy is considered as a negative emotion emerging from upward social comparison. The feeling of envy provokes either the motivation to level down the envied person by losing their superiority (malicious envy) and advantages or the motivation to level up oneself to achieve their desires (benign envy). The present study (NV = 282) examined the psychometric properties of the Benign and Malicious Envy Scale/ BeMaS (Lange and Crusius, 2015), and using the scale to evaluate two forms of dispositional envy in a Vietnamese population. A confirmatory factor analysis showed that the scale's two-factor structure indicates a moderate model fit to the data. A reliability analysis showed internal consistency in both envy scales. There was no: Significant correlation between malicious and benign envy. The mean scores of the benign envy scale were higher than those of the malicious scale, and neither of the scores were dependent on demographic variables. Future research should re-evaluate the psychometric properties of the Vietnamese version of the BeMaS in a larger sample and a more diverse population.