Jealousy Test — Thoughts, Feeling and Checking

Three separate things jealousy is made of, measured apart: the thoughts (how often your mind goes to a rival and stays there), the feeling (how hard it lands when one actually shows up), and the behaviour (checking, verifying, looking). Each gets its own level, and the combination of the three puts you in one of eight profiles. They are measured apart because they genuinely come apart — a person can check nothing and think about it constantly, or feel nothing much and still read every message.

Because "you are 64 % jealous" hides the part that decides what to do about it. Two people with the same total can be in completely different situations: one turns it over in their head for a week and never acts on it, the other never gives it a second thought and still checks a phone out of pure habit. Those are not degrees of the same thing, they are different things — and the research the test is built on separates them for exactly that reason. A single number puts both people on the same rung of a ladder that neither of them is standing on.

That is the question most people arrive here with, and the honest answer is that "normal" is the wrong axis. Checking is common — common enough that it tells you almost nothing on its own. What is worth knowing is what it is attached to. Checking that runs on top of constant suspicion and real hurt is one situation; checking that has quietly outlived the worry that started it is another, and it is more ordinary than people expect. This test separates those two because they need different things, and neither of them is answered by a verdict on whether you are allowed. What it will not do is tell you whether to keep doing it — that is a conversation with the person involved, not with a questionnaire.

No, and we are not affiliated with its authors. What we take from Pfeiffer and Wong's work is the three-component structure — the finding that jealousy separates into thought, feeling and behaviour rather than being one appetite — and a structure is a model, not a questionnaire. Their published items are copyrighted and not ours to reproduce; all 18 statements here are written by us, and so are the thresholds and the eight profiles. If you want the original instrument, it belongs to its authors and to the journals that published it.

Neither, and this is the one construct where that is not a polite hedge. The research finding worth knowing is that the three components do not point the same way: the feeling side tends to go together with love, while the suspicious-thinking side tends to go against it. So the bottom of this scale is not a clean bill of health. Feeling nothing when a rival appears is a real state with real costs, and it is not the same as trust. The eight profiles are shapes, not a ranking, and there is no result the test is hoping you get.

By who else is in the room. Attachment measures what happens between the two of you when closeness is at stake — unanswered messages, distance, needing reassurance. This measures what happens when a third person enters the frame. The two are related, and the research says so, but they are not the same question, and they come apart often enough to be worth measuring separately: plenty of securely attached people have a sharp reaction to a rival, and plenty of anxiously attached people never think about one. If you have taken both, read them together — attachment tells you what you do with distance, this tells you what you do with competition.

Yes, and more than on most of our tests, because this one measures a relationship as much as it measures you. All three levels move with who you are with, how long you have been there and what has happened in it — the same person can come out at opposite corners of the grid in two different relationships, and that is the construct behaving correctly rather than the test being unreliable. Retaking it after a real change of circumstances is informative. Retaking it three days after a specific bad evening mostly measures the evening.

On purpose: half the items are worded so that agreeing with them means less jealousy, not more. It is the standard defence against answering on autopilot, and on this test it matters more than usual. With every item pointing the same way, agreeing with everything would hand out the heaviest profile in the set to someone who told the test nothing — a serious label on no evidence. The split makes that impossible. Answer without reading, in either direction, and all three levels land exactly on the line and read as low: you get "No Signal", the lightest corner. Worth saying plainly, because it is not the same promise as "you will end up in the middle" — an unread pass lands you in a corner, just not that one.

No. This is a questionnaire about a normal human response to a real situation, not a diagnosis, and it cannot be one — jealousy is something everyone carries some amount of, and its level says more about the state of a relationship than about a defect in a person. What a questionnaire cannot tell apart is a rough season from something heavier. If checking or suspicion is taking hours of your week, if it survives every reassurance you get, or if it has started to cost you the relationship it is meant to protect, that is worth raising with a qualified professional. Not because this test found something — it can't — but because it is worth help.