Psychometric properties of the benign and malicious envy scale: Assessment of structure, reliability, and measurement invariance across the United States, Germany, Russia, and Poland

The Benign and Malicious Envy Scale is a promising self-report measure forming a counterpoint to the unidimensional approach to the assessment of dispositional envy. The goals of the present study were to examine the reliability, structure, and measurement equivalence of the Benign and Malicious Envy Scale across four independent groups from the United States, Germany, Russia, and Poland. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that the structure of the Benign and Malicious Envy Scale is two-dimensional and its measurement is reliable. Moreover, multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, supplemented by alignment optimization, revealed that the scale is invariant by country across all factors regardless of whether a linguistic distinction between the two envy types in the respective language exists. The results speak to the current debate about whether envy should be conceptualized as unitary or as an emotion that occurs in two distinct forms, supporting the latter view. Additionally, country-level differences in envy point to cultural differences which merit further research.