Jealousy and the Brain: 5 Ways the Love Hormone Also Feels Like Anger

By Dr. Narayan Rout | Author | Researcher |     Psychology & Indian Wisdom  |  44 min read |    Published: June 9, 2026

In This Research Pillar

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Way 1: Oxytocin Is Not the Love Hormone — It Is the Bond-Protection Hormone
3. Way 2: What fMRI Shows — Jealousy Lives in the Brain’s Anger Circuits
4. Way 3: The Tribal Hormone — How Oxytocin Drives In-Group Love and Out-Group Hostility
5. Way 4: Dopamine, Serotonin, Cortisol — The Neurochemistry of the Green-Eyed Monster
6. Way 5: Social Media Has Turned the Jealousy Circuit Into a 24-Hour Surveillance System
7. What Ancient India Knew — Irshya, the Arishadvargas, and the Prescription of Mudita
8. The Quest Sage Insight
9. What You Can Do With This
10. Conclusion: The Same Molecule, Two Faces
11. Frequently Asked Questions: Jealousy, the Brain, and Oxytocin
12. References and Sources
13. Further Reading

There is something deeply confusing about jealousy. It arrives in the middle of love — not instead of it. The same person whose presence fills you with warmth can, in a different moment, fill you with a burning possessiveness that feels nothing like warmth at all. You reach for the person you love and find yourself gripped by something that resembles anger more than tenderness.

The neuroscience explains this confusion with uncomfortable precision: the molecule most associated with love — oxytocin — is also the molecule most associated with jealousy, envy, and in-group versus out-group aggression. This is not a paradox. It is a single mechanism viewed from two sides. Oxytocin does not produce love. It produces attachment and the protection of attachment. When the attachment is secure, it feels like love. When the attachment is threatened, it feels like jealousy. The hormone is the same. Only the circumstances have changed.

This article examines five specific ways through which the love hormone generates anger-adjacent emotional states — drawing on fMRI studies of romantic jealousy, research on oxytocin’s dual nature, the evolutionary psychology of jealousy’s functional design, and the ancient Vedic framework that classified jealousy (Irshya) as one of six inner enemies two thousand years before neuroscience confirmed what it does to the brain.

The love hormone nickname stuck because of oxytocin’s role in childbirth, breastfeeding, pair bonding, and the warm feeling of human touch and connection. These associations are real and well-documented. But they are one dimension of a molecule whose full function is considerably more complex — and considerably more interesting.

Oxytocin’s fundamental biological role is not producing positive emotions. It is encoding social information as significant and motivating the organism to respond to that social information. When the social information is a bonding moment — a newborn, a loving partner, a trusted friend — oxytocin encodes that moment as deeply significant and motivates approach and connection. When the social information is a social threat — a rival near the bonded partner, a perceived slight within the bonded group, a challenge to the attachment — oxytocin encodes that threat as deeply significant and motivates approach and response. The response to threat is not warmth. It is jealousy, possessiveness, and aggression.

The Approach-Withdrawal Framework

The key insight from neuroscience is that the brain processes emotional stimuli along an approach-withdrawal dimension, not a positive-negative dimension. Love, anger, jealousy, and envy are all approach-motivated states — they all involve motivation to move toward the target of the emotion, whether to embrace, confront, compete with, or monitor. Fear and grief are withdrawal-motivated — they involve movement away from the threat or loss.

Oxytocin facilitates approach-motivated emotions. This means it amplifies both love (approach the person you are bonded to) and jealousy or anger (approach the threat to the person you are bonded to). A 2009 study in Biological Psychiatry confirmed this directly: oxytocin enhanced gloating and envy alongside prosocial emotions. Research on borderline personality disorder found oxytocin decreased trust in participants sensitive to rejection — the opposite of what the love hormone narrative would predict. The molecule is consistent. Only the frame changes.

If you could watch a jealous brain on a functional MRI scanner, you would not see the reward circuits that light up when we think of the person we love. You would see a different network entirely — the network associated with social pain, threat processing, and the obsessive-compulsive monitoring of dangerous situations.

fMRI studies of romantic jealousy consistently activate a specific set of neural regions. The insula — involved in processing social emotions, bodily awareness, and disgust — activates intensely during jealousy. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which functions as the brain’s conflict monitor and social comparison centre, shows strong activation. The medial prefrontal cortex, involved in self-referential processing and social threat assessment, engages. And the fronto-striatal-thalamo-frontal network — associated with habit formation, reward monitoring, and obsessive-compulsive behaviour patterns — activates in a way that explains the intrusive, repetitive quality that jealousy frequently has.

Angry Faces, Not Loving Faces

A study of 85 healthy subjects using the Multidimensional Jealousy Scale and fMRI found a specific and striking result: of all the emotional expressions presented — happy, fearful, sad, angry, and neutral faces — only intensity ratings of angry faces were positively associated with jealousy scores. Subjects with higher jealousy scores showed greater activation in the right thalamus, insula, and limbic regions specifically during processing of angry faces.

This finding is neurologically telling. Jealousy sensitises the brain to anger — not to love, not to sadness, not to fear. The jealous brain is scanning its environment for confrontation, challenge, and territorial threat. It is running the threat-detection programme rather than the attachment programme. The love hormone, operating in a threatened social context, has activated the anger-adjacent circuitry that the threat context demands.

The anterior cingulate cortex’s role deserves particular attention. The ACC has been called the brain’s comparison centre and its social pain processor. Activation of the ACC during jealousy — and during social comparison on social media — reflects the same underlying function: evaluating one’s relative social position and registering the pain of perceived disadvantage. The social pain of jealousy is neurologically real. It activates the same circuits that physical pain activates — which is why jealousy hurts in a way that is not metaphorical.

Carsten De Dreu’s research at the University of Amsterdam produced findings about oxytocin that significantly complicated the love hormone narrative. Oxytocin, he found, is not a universally prosocial molecule. It is a parochial one — intensely prosocial toward the in-group and simultaneously more hostile toward the out-group.

In a series of experiments published in PLOS ONE (2012), De Dreu’s team demonstrated that oxytocin motivates non-cooperation with out-group members in intergroup conflict — specifically to protect vulnerable in-group members. The mechanism has deep evolutionary roots: group-living animals need internal cohesion and external threat response. Oxytocin serves both simultaneously. It makes you love your group more fiercely — and defend it more aggressively.

The Tend-and-Defend Mechanism

This tend-and-defend mechanism explains one of jealousy’s most universal features: it does not feel like a character flaw when it is happening. It feels like righteous protection. The person experiencing romantic jealousy is not (usually) experiencing themselves as irrational or petty — they are experiencing themselves as protecting something genuinely valuable from a genuine threat. The oxytocin system that activated this response is doing exactly what it evolved to do: identifying a threat to a valued bond and motivating a defensive response.

The in-group/out-group framework also explains the specific neurology of social comparison. Research confirms that when a rival (out-group) succeeds — upward social comparison — the anterior cingulate cortex activates, registering social pain. When a rival fails — downward comparison — the ventral striatum activates, registering reward. Oxytocin amplifies both responses. In the context of romantic jealousy, the rival’s success triggers ACC-mediated social pain; the rival’s failure or rejection brings ventral striatal reward. This is not attractive psychology. But it is accurate neuroscience.

The evolutionary calibration of jealousy to realistic rather than fantastic rivals (we are more jealous of our slightly richer neighbour than of Bill Gates, as Frontiers in Psychology 2017 observes) reflects the same in-group logic: threats from actual rivals in one’s immediate social world are genuine; threats from remote figures are not. Oxytocin responds to actual social threats in the organism’s lived social environment — which is why jealousy is frequently most intense toward people we actually know.

For the broader neuroscience of social comparison and its relationship to economic inequality, see Complain, Compare, Compete: 3 Evolutionary Instincts Running Your Life (TheQuestSage.com). For the amygdala’s role in threat detection and emotional hijacking, see The Amygdala Hijack: Why Anger Makes You Stupid and How to Get Smart Again (TheQuestSage.com).

Jealousy is not a single neurochemical event. It is a cascade — a sequence of hormonal and neurotransmitter responses that unfold rapidly when the brain perceives a threat to a valued social bond. Understanding the chemistry helps explain both the intensity of the experience and the specific features — the obsessive repetition, the hypervigilance, the physical discomfort — that make jealousy so distinctive as an emotional state.

Dopamine — The Alert Signal

Dopamine is typically associated with pleasure, reward, and motivation. But dopamine is more precisely a salience signal — it marks stimuli as important and motivates the organism to orient toward them. When a relationship threat is perceived, dopamine surges not in the reward circuitry but in the threat-monitoring circuitry — the fronto-striatal dopaminergic network that fMRI studies consistently implicate in jealousy. This dopamine is not pleasurable. It is alerting. It creates the hypervigilant, can’t-stop-thinking quality of jealousy — the same mechanism that makes a worry impossible to dismiss or a danger impossible to ignore.

The dopaminergic involvement in jealousy also explains why it can become compulsive. The dopamine surge that marks a social threat as salient creates a motivation to resolve the threat. But in jealousy, the threat is often ambiguous or unresolvable — the partner’s unexplained lateness, the colleague’s attentiveness, the social media comment. The dopamine keeps marking the ambiguity as important, the threat-monitoring keeps returning to it, and the loop that results is the obsessive quality that characterises jealousy at its most uncomfortable.

Serotonin Deficit and the OCD Connection

Pathological jealousy — jealousy that becomes intrusive, repetitive, and resistant to reason — shares its neurochemical signature with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Both involve serotonin deficit and the repetitive, intrusive thought patterns that insufficient serotonin activity produces. The obsessive suspicion, the compulsive checking of a partner’s phone or social media, the reassurance-seeking that temporarily relieves but never resolves the jealousy loop — these are OCD-pattern behaviours driven by the same serotonin deficit that underlies clinical OCD.

This connection has clinical implications. SSRIs — selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors — are first-line treatments for both OCD and pathological jealousy, precisely because both involve insufficient serotonergic modulation of the repetitive thought-checking cycle. The cognitive-behavioural approaches that break the OCD loop — exposure with response prevention, cognitive restructuring, metacognitive therapy — are also the approaches that most effectively treat pathological jealousy. Not because jealousy is OCD, but because the neurochemical overlap makes the therapeutic approach transferable.

Cortisol and the Body Under Jealousy

When jealousy activates, the hypothalamus triggers a cortisol and norepinephrine cascade — the stress response. The body prepares for action: heart rate increases, attention narrows, muscles tighten, and the prefrontal cortex’s capacity for rational, contextual thinking is partially suppressed by the amygdala’s emergency protocols. The physical discomfort of jealousy — the tightness in the chest, the knot in the stomach, the restlessness — is the cortisol response making itself felt in the body. It is not metaphorical suffering. It is a physiological stress activation whose consequences — including hippocampal damage from chronic cortisol exposure — are real if jealousy becomes chronic.

Every evolutionary design has an environment in which it functions as intended and an environment in which it misfires. The jealousy system — calibrated over evolutionary time to detect realistic threats to actual valued relationships within one’s lived social world — is misfiring in the social media environment in ways that cause enormous psychological harm.

Social media platforms are, among other things, optimised social comparison machines. Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn present carefully curated versions of others’ lives — the highlight reel of relationships, achievements, appearances, and social connections that, in aggregate, creates a comparison environment vastly more stimulating to the anterior cingulate cortex than any environment the human brain evolved for.

fMRI research confirms that even brief social media browsing sessions trigger intense activation in the amygdala and insula — the regions most consistently associated with jealousy, social pain, and negative emotional states. The ACC, the brain’s comparison centre, activates with each scroll that presents evidence of someone else’s apparent success, beauty, happiness, or romantic fulfilment.

For individuals in romantic relationships, social media creates a specific jealousy amplification mechanism: the partner’s interactions on social media (likes, comments, follows) become data points for the jealousy surveillance system. An evolutionary brain that evolved to monitor actual social threats in a small community is now running the same threat-detection programme across hundreds of social media connections, generating oxytocin-mediated jealousy responses to social interactions that in most cases represent no genuine threat. The alarm system is calibrated for a world that no longer exists. The volume has been turned up. The false positives have multiplied.

The Vedic and Indian philosophical traditions classified jealousy with a precision that anticipates the neuroscientific framework by two thousand years. Irshya — Sanskrit for jealousy and envy — is one of the Arishadvargas: the six inner enemies (Shadripus) that distort perception, impair clear thinking, and undermine the individual’s capacity for wise action. The six are: Kama (desire), Krodha (anger), Lobha (greed), Moha (delusion), Mada (arrogance), and Matsarya/Irshya (jealousy and envy).

The classification of jealousy alongside anger, desire, and greed is not moralistic condemnation. It is a systems observation about states of mind that, when unmanaged, hijack the executive function — what the Vedic tradition calls Viveka (discriminative awareness) and modern neuroscience locates in the prefrontal cortex. The Arishadvargas are the states that suppress Viveka — exactly what the neuroscience of emotional hijacking describes when the amygdala overwhelms prefrontal regulation.

Mudita — The Specific Antidote

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali prescribe specific antidotes for each category of difficult mental state. For jealousy — the distress produced by others’ success — the prescribed antidote is Mudita: sympathetic joy, genuine happiness at others’ good fortune. This is not a platitude. It is a precisely targeted cognitive reappraisal intervention. Mudita requires the practitioner to deliberately cultivate the opposite mental movement to the one jealousy produces — instead of the ACC registering others’ success as social pain, Mudita trains the ventral striatum to register others’ success as shared reward.

Modern positive psychology has arrived at the same prescription through a different path. The cultivation of Mudita — known in contemporary psychology as Freudenfreude, the opposite of Schadenfreude — has been shown to improve relationship quality, reduce social comparison distress, and increase subjective wellbeing. The ancient prescription and the modern evidence converge. The mechanism is the same: retraining the social comparison circuitry from threat-detection toward shared-reward.

The Bhagavad Gita’s description of the person who receives its teaching is someone who is anasuya — free from jealousy. Krishna’s choice of this specific quality as a prerequisite for wisdom is not incidental. It reflects the Gita’s deep understanding that jealousy — by activating the threat-detection, social comparison, and obsessive-monitoring circuits — prevents the clear-sighted perception that wisdom requires. You cannot see clearly when the ACC is registering social pain. You cannot think wisely when cortisol has suppressed the prefrontal cortex. Anasuya — freedom from jealousy — is the psychological condition for receiving the Gita’s teaching, because it is the condition for clear perception.

I want to say something about what jealousy actually is — beneath the neuroscience and the Vedic classification — because I think both frameworks, while illuminating, risk abstracting us from the simple human experience that makes jealousy worth understanding.

Jealousy is what love feels like when it is afraid. It is not the opposite of love — it is love’s defensive posture, the way the heart braces itself against potential loss. The oxytocin that deepened the attachment is the same oxytocin that fires the warning when the attachment is threatened. The fMRI that shows anger circuits rather than love circuits is measuring the same underlying valuation — the same intensity of caring — expressed through the threat-detection system rather than the bonding system.

The problem is not that jealousy exists. The evolutionary logic makes sense: a species that did not protect its valued bonds would not maintain them. The problem is that jealousy, unmanaged and unchecked, consumes the very thing it is trying to protect. The obsessive monitoring that serotonin deficit produces does not protect the relationship — it erodes it. The cortisol activation that prepares for confrontation does not resolve the threat — it creates new ones. The social comparison surveillance on Instagram does not provide security — it generates an endless supply of false alarms.

The Vedic prescription of Viveka — discriminative awareness — is not asking the jealous mind to simply stop feeling what it feels. It is asking it to observe its own processes with enough clarity to distinguish between the genuine alarm and the false alarm, between the real threat and the threat that the oxytocin-activated tribal brain is constructing from ambiguous social data. This is the same metacognitive capacity that CBT asks of the OCD patient — not to suppress the thought, but to observe it clearly enough to choose how to respond to it.

Understanding that jealousy is a bond-protection mechanism gone hyperactive in a social media environment, running on the same neurochemistry as OCD, activating anger circuits rather than love circuits — this understanding is not a cure for jealousy. But it is the beginning of Viveka. And Viveka is the beginning of freedom from the suffering that unmanaged jealousy produces.

• Recognise the threat-protection mechanism in yourself. When jealousy arises, notice it as the bond-protection system activating — not as evidence of weakness, insecurity, or inadequacy. Ask: what bond am I protecting? What threat has activated this? Is the threat real or has the oxytocin system misfired? This is not asking you to dismiss the jealousy but to observe it with enough clarity to respond rather than react.
• Audit your social media exposure. If your jealousy is most intense after social media use — check your partner’s activity on Instagram, scroll through a rival’s LinkedIn, compare your relationship to the curated ones you see — recognise what is happening neurologically. The ACC is registering social comparison pain triggered by stimuli your evolutionary brain cannot distinguish from real threats. The stimuli are not real threats. Reducing exposure to high-comparison social media is not avoidance — it is environmental regulation of a misfiring alarm system.
• Practice Mudita deliberately. When you notice jealousy or envy arising in response to someone else’s success, good fortune, or happiness — pause and intentionally cultivate genuine happiness at their good fortune. This feels counterintuitive and initially effortful. It is. But it is the specific cognitive retraining that the Yoga Sutras prescribe for jealousy — and that modern positive psychology confirms works. Start small. Build the neural habit.
• If jealousy has become obsessive — seek help. When jealousy produces intrusive, repetitive thoughts that you cannot dismiss through reason; when it drives compulsive checking of your partner’s phone, social media, or location; when it persists despite reassurance and evidence to the contrary — this is the OCD-pattern jealousy that requires professional support. CBT approaches that address the serotonin-deficit obsessive loop are effective. This is not a relationship problem. It is a neurochemical one. Treat it accordingly.
• Discuss the neuroscience of jealousy with your partner. Naming what is happening neurologically — my oxytocin system is activating a threat response; I am experiencing social comparison pain in the ACC; my evolutionary brain is misidentifying social media data as genuine threats — creates metacognitive distance between the experience and the reaction. It also invites the partner into the experience rather than directing the experience at them. Jealousy processed together is categorically different from jealousy weaponised.

Oxytocin makes you love your partner. The same oxytocin activates possessiveness, jealousy, and anger when that partner’s bond seems threatened. Jealousy activates anger circuits in the brain — the insula, the anterior cingulate cortex, the fronto-striatal dopaminergic network — not the reward circuits of love. Dopamine marks relationship threats as urgently salient. Serotonin deficit produces the obsessive loop. Cortisol prepares the body for confrontation. The evolutionary logic is coherent: protect the bond. The modern application is frequently counterproductive: misfire in a social media environment, erode the bond while trying to protect it.

The Vedic tradition’s identification of Irshya as an inner enemy — a state that suppresses discriminative awareness and distorts perception — is the most practically useful description of jealousy available. Not because ancient texts are more accurate than neuroscience, but because ‘inner enemy’ captures something that ‘neurochemical cascade’ does not: the fact that jealousy, unmanaged, works against the interests of the person experiencing it, regardless of whether its original threat-detection function was sound.

Viveka — the discriminative awareness that can distinguish between the real alarm and the false one, between the genuine threat and the cortisol-amplified social media data — is not a mystical capacity. It is the prefrontal cortex doing its job of regulating the amygdala and the ACC. Meditation, cognitive reappraisal, social media reduction, Mudita practice, and CBT-based approaches to the OCD-pattern jealousy loop — these are the practical tools for developing Viveka in the domain of jealousy. The love hormone and the anger it can produce are not enemies. They are the same biological force, asking to be understood.

1. The Conversation. (2026, March 18). The dark side of the love drug — oxytocin linked to gloating, envy and aggression. 2009 Biological Psychiatry study: oxytocin enhanced envy and gloating; borderline personality disorder and decreased trust; approach-withdrawal framework; anger as approach-motivated state. https://theconversation.com/the-dark-side-of-the-love-drug-oxytocin-linked-to-gloating-envy-and-aggression-2781

2. De Dreu, C.K.W., Shalvi, S., Greer, L.L., Van Kleef, G.A., & Handgraaf, M.J.J. (2012). Oxytocin Motivates Non-Cooperation in Intergroup Conflict to Protect Vulnerable In-Group Members. PLOS ONE. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0046751. Oxytocin as parochial hormone; tend-and-defend mechanism; in-group love and out-group hostility; group-living evolutionary basis.

3. PMC8466309. (2021). Effects of Oxytocin on Social Comparisons in Intergroup Situations. Oxytocin facilitates intergroup social comparisons; upward comparison activates ACC (pain); downward comparison activates ventral striatum (reward); oxytocin amplifies envy and schadenfreude.

4. Terris, E.T., Beavin, L.E., Barraza, J.A., Schloss, J., & Zak, P.J. (2018). Endogenous Oxytocin Release Eliminates In-Group Bias in Monetary Transfers With Perspective-Taking. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00035. Endogenous oxytocin and group bias; perspective-taking as moderator.

5. Zheng, X. et al. (2018). Romantic jealousy is positively associated with fronto-striatal, insula and limbic responses to angry faces. bioRxiv. DOI: 10.1101/502096. 85 healthy subjects; Multidimensional Jealousy Scale; only angry faces positively associated with jealousy scores; right thalamus, insula, limbic activation.

6. Zheng, X., & Kendrick, K.M. (2021). Neural and Molecular Contributions to Pathological Jealousy and a Potential Therapeutic Role for Intranasal Oxytocin. Frontiers in Pharmacology. DOI: 10.3389/fphar.2021.652473. Pathological jealousy neural correlates; dopamine serotonin involvement; oxytocin therapeutic potential; intranasal oxytocin and romantic bonds.

7. Neural Correlates of Jealousy. (2023). ResearchGate review. fMRI: insula, anterior cingulate cortex, medial prefrontal cortex in romantic jealousy; fronto-striatal-thalamo-frontal network and OCD pattern; dimensional approach to jealousy and pathological variants.

8. Jeung-Maarse, H., Schmitgen, M.M., Schmitt, R., Bertsch, K., & Herpertz, S.C. (2023). Oxytocin effects on amygdala reactivity to angry faces in males and females with antisocial personality disorder. Neuropsychopharmacology. DOI: 10.1038/s41386-023-01549-9. Oxytocin and amygdala reactivity; anger circuits; ASPD and aggression.

9. Bhagwagar Bhattacharya, V.S.R., & Ramachandran, V.S. (2017). The Evolutionary Psychology of Envy and Jealousy. Frontiers in Psychology. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01619. Jealousy as functional design; calibration to realistic rivals; sex differences in jealousy; cross-cultural consistency.

10. NeuroLaunch. (2024, October 3). Jealousy in the Brain: Neurological Causes and Mechanisms. ACC as comparison centre; dopamine alert signal; cortisol norepinephrine cascade; testosterone estrogen jealousy intensity; social media and amygdala activation. https://neurolaunch.com/what-causes-jealousy-in-the-brain/

11. ScienceDaily / Morris, J.P. et al. (2015). Molecular tag explains differences in brain’s response to anger, fear. DNA methylation on oxytocin receptor gene; amygdala and emotion processing; oxytocin receptor and anger-fear responses.

12. Patanjali (~2nd century BCE). Yoga Sutras. Mudita as antidote to jealousy and envy (Sutra 1.33); Viveka as discriminative awareness; metacognitive approach to the Arishadvargas.

13. Charaka Samhita / Vedic texts. Arishadvargas (six inner enemies): Kama, Krodha, Lobha, Moha, Mada, Matsarya/Irshya. Systems classification of Irshya as inner enemy suppressing Viveka.

14. Bhagavad Gita. Chapter 18, Verse 71. Anasuya — freedom from jealousy — as prerequisite for receiving wisdom. Krishna’s identification of jealousy-free perception as condition for clear understanding.

15. Narayan Rout. Yogic Intelligence vs Artificial Intelligence. BFC Publications, 2025. (Prajna and the inner intelligence that jealousy obscures.)

Neuroscience of Emotions — P8 Series

Your Brain on Feelings: The Neuroscience of Emotions (TheQuestSage.com) — The complete neuroscience of the emotional brain — love, fear, anger, grief, and joy.

The Amygdala Hijack: Why Anger Makes You Stupid and How to Get Smart Again (TheQuestSage.com) — How the amygdala overrides the prefrontal cortex — and how to reclaim rational thought.

Complain, Compare, Compete: 3 Evolutionary Instincts Running Your Life (TheQuestSage.com) — The evolutionary roots of social comparison — the engine behind jealousy.

The Dopamine Trap: How Social Media Hijacks Your Brain (TheQuestSage.com) — The dopamine mechanism behind social media’s jealousy amplification.

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