My sister Theresa, Social Psychologist extraordinaire, is looking for more survey participants. She writes the following:
Hello everyone,
Here is another opportunity to contribute to psychology research. This project is a Loyola University Maryland research study being conducted by one of my students. The study explores jealousy and we need a pretty large sample size for the nature of the questions being asked, we’d appreciate your help! All responses are confidential and anonymous. I will have Mike D post the research findings when we have them – thanks very much for your help!
You can take the survey by clicking here!
DONE! For anyone else participating, there are 11 pages of questions (because some of the pages are a bit lengthy – so set aside at least seven minutes).
Done here! Tree- still waiting on those results from the last one!
Dear everyone – Here are long awaited results.
Evolutionary theory suggests a specific pattern for jealousy in response to romantic infidelity. Sexual infidelity is supposed to be particularly threatening to men (e.g., “I cheated on you by sleeping with him.) and emotional infidelity (e.g., “I am in love with another woman”) is expected to be more threatening for women. Threat produces the response of jealousy. We wanted to expand our understanding of romantic jealousy to include a more social explanation because even though MOST women (for example) are more threatened/jealous in response to emotional infidelity, this is not universally true. Maybe we can explain this by measuring gender role orientation (masculine; feminine tendencies). SO, in this study our main question was whether masculine and feminine tendencies provide a useful explanation for differences in jealous responses to infidelity.
We did not find evidence that men who were more threatened by sexual infidelity identified as more masculine or less feminine. Biological sex was a better predictor (i.e., evolutionary perspective) than gender role orientation. Our one point of puzzle was that in our sample, more men reported being more emotionally jealous (43%) than sexually jealous (18%). This directly counters the existing literature.