How do we respond when we encounter people who are more successful than we are? Often, we imagine two paths: admiration and envy. Admiration is seen as a noble sentiment—we admire people for admiring others, detecting, in their admiration, a suggestion of taste and humility. Envy, by contrast, is thought to be inherently bad—a “feeling of mortification and ill-will occasioned by the contemplation of superior advantages possessed by another,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. If he can, Bertrand Russell wrote, the envious person “deprives others of their advantages, which to him is as desirable as it would be to secure the same advantages himself. If this passion is allowed to run riot it becomes fatal to all excellence, and even to the most useful exercise of exceptional skill.”

Is that really the case? Or can something frustrating and painful lead, almost in spite of itself, to positive ends—to even better ends, perhaps, than its more admired counterpart? Not all envy, we are learning, is created equal, and while some flavors leave nothing but a bad aftertaste others may inspire us to reach new heights of achievement.

Richard Smith, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky who began studying envy in the nineteen-eighties, writes that the feeling typically arises from a combination of two factors. The first is relevance: an envied advantage must be meaningful to us personally. A ballerina’s beautiful dance is unlikely to cause envy in a lawyer, unless she once had professional dancing aspirations of her own. The second is similarity: an envied person must be comparable to us. Even though we’re both writers, I’m unlikely to envy Ernest Hemingway. Aristotle, in describing envy, quotes the saying “potter against potter.” When we admire someone, we do so from a distance. When we envy someone, we picture ourselves in their place. (Smith’s work, in turn, was inspired by a 1984 paper on “social-comparison jealousy,” by the psychologists Peter Salovey and Judith Rodin.)

Admiration and envy can seem like opposites: admiration inspires us, while envy drags us down. But the psychologist Niels van de Ven, of Tilburg University, in the Netherlands, argues that this duality may not fully capture the emotion’s real complexity. When he examined the concept in cultures across the world, he found that the word itself is not as clear cut as English speakers may think. In English, envy is envy. But in other languages, envy takes on a dual guise. In Polish, there is zazdrość and zawiść_._ In Thai, ìt-ch__ia and rít-yaa. In Dutch, there’s benijden, from the root beniden (to be unable to bear something), and afgunst, from niet gunnen (to begrudge). Van de Ven translates this pair of Dutch words as “benign” and “malicious” envy, respectively.

In 2009, van de Ven attempted to find out whether the conceptual nuances of two-envy languages exist even in single-envy languages, like English. First, he worked with Dutch students, who have two words for envy, to gather baseline descriptions of how they felt benign envy, malicious envy, admiration, and resentment. Then he asked American and Spanish students, who have only one word for envy, to describe a time they felt envious. He found that, among the American students, both types of envy were described, spontaneously, at about equal rates. (Among the Spanish students, benign envy was described around a third of the time.) “Malicious envy felt much more frustrating, the experience led to a motivation to hurt the other, and one hoped that the other would fail in something,” van de Ven wrote. “For benign envy, the other was liked more, the situation was more inspiring, and one tried harder to attain more for oneself.”

Benign envy can sound a lot like admiration. The difference is that, while admiration feels good, envy is painful. By way of illustration, van de Ven cites the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote that, while “admiration is happy self-surrender,” “envy is unhappy self-assertion.” Admiration can be a pleasant feeling, in large part because we think of the people we admire as being unlike ourselves. But people we benignly envy seem to be a lot like us. That realization hits closer to home—and hurts. The differences between benign and malicious envy, meanwhile, are stark: the two spur us to act in very different ways. In a followup, van de Ven asked his subjects, every evening for two weeks, whether they’d experienced envy that day; if they had, he probed the specific contours of the emotion and asked them to report how it had made them act. He found that the more closely their feelings aligned with malicious envy the more they complained about the person they envied. (They didn’t do anything about it; they were just nasty.) By contrast, if they felt benign envy they worked harder. Benign envy may be unpleasant, but it’s a driver of change for the better.

This distinction dovetails with some results obtained by other psychologists. In a 2011 study of nearly five hundred adults, the psychologists Sarah Hill, Danielle DelPriore, and Phillip Vaughan found that people who were feeling envious experienced an increase in their ability to pay attention to, and commit details to memory about, the target of their envy; for example, they spent more time reading interviews with a group of made-up peers, and performed better on a surprise memory test regarding those peers’ personal details. Admiration, and emotional arousal more broadly, had no such effect. Although the study didn’t explicitly differentiate between benign and malicious envy, it did measure such emotional correlates as hostility and resentfulness. Those measurements suggested that the envy felt by the study participants resembled benign envy more than its nastier counterpart.

In 2011, van de Ven and two colleagues found a way to test the differences between benign envy and admiration more directly. In one study, thirty-four college students were given one of two fake reading-comprehension exercises. Both exercises were biographies of fictitious scientists: half of them were written to suggest that self-improvement is possible (if you work hard, you can succeed despite obstacles), the other half to suggest that success comes down to luck (you’re born with it, or you aren’t). Van de Ven then asked the students to read a fake newspaper article about a fellow-student, Hans de Groot, winning a prize in an important competition. If the students had been primed by the first reading-comprehension exercise, they felt benign envy toward Hans (essentially, “I could do that, too, if I tried”); if they’d been primed by the second exercise, they felt slightly more admiration (something like, “I shouldn’t even try; I’ll just admire him from afar”). While the students who felt benign envy pledged to study more than they had in prior semesters, those who felt admiration didn’t. In another study, van de Ven found that students who felt benign envy, but not malicious envy or admiration, performed better on a test of creativity, the remote associates task: they were able to provide, on average, 11.4 correct answers, as compared to 9.8 when they felt admiration, and 8.5 when they felt malicious envy.

No one would deny that feeling envy is unpleasant, or that feeling envious sometimes leads us down a path we wish we hadn’t taken. Envy is frequently corrosive and destructive. And yet, the right kind of envy can serve an important personal and social function. It spurs competition and improvement. The title of a recent paper from the University of California, Santa Barbara, nicely captures the effect. It’s called “Inspired by Hope, Motivated by Envy.”