Men and Women, Sexual and Emotional Jealousy

While I'm away
You can let the mouse go down on you
Let the mouse do what I'd do
If I was there
But you'd better explain
That I have a vendetta in my narrow bones
And a vindictive eye
Of my jealousy I have no control
No control



::: Franz Ferdinand "Bullet": LISTEN/WATCH

The evolution-based approach:

"A potentially rich framework for analyzing many aspects of interpersonal relationships has been provided by Evolutionary Psychology (Buss, 1994, Buss et al., 1999). With increasing frequency, jealousy as an aspect of relationship has been the focus of both empirical research and theoretical formulation.
It is often speculated that there are important gender differences with regard to the elicitation of jealousy. Women may be more threatened by the potential loss of attention and other emotional resources in a romantic relationship, whereas men may be more concerned about potential sexual infidelity. Based on the evolutionary model (Symons, 1979) it has been proposed that because males can never be completely confident about the paternity of any offspring they would be more concerned by sexual infidelity. Sexual infidelity would raise questions about paternity and the risk of investing resources, both human and economic, in another person's offspring. On the other hand, females would be more upset by emotional infidelity that might indicate a lack of long-term commitment and success of the relationship by the male. Females know that their offspring will have their genetic legacy, but need assurance that the partner will provide resources for the survival of the offspring (Cann et al., 2001)." (Bhowon, Ah-Kion & Tseung-Wong, 2004)

Doubting the evolutionary explanation and placing jealousy within an attachment theoretical perspective:

"Studies have found that more men than women endorse sexual infidelity as more distressing than emotional infidelity, whereas more women than men endorse emotional infidelity as more distressing than sexual infidelity. Some evolutionary psychologists have proposed that this sex difference can be best conceptualized as reflecting evolution-based differences in parental investment that produce a need for paternity certainty among men and a need for male investment in offspring among women. Nonetheless, a conspicuous subset of men report emotional infidelity as more distressing than sexual infidelity. Current theorizing explains between-sex differences but not within-sex differences. We hypothesized that attachment-style differences may help to explain both between- and within-sex differences in jealousy. As hypothesized, dismissing avoidant participants reported more jealousy regarding sexual than emotional infidelity (64.8%), and secure participants, including secure men, reported more jealousy regarding emotional than sexual infidelity (77.3%), chi(2)(3, N = 411) = 45.03, p < .001. A series of sequential logistic regression analyses indicated significant moderation of the sex-jealousy relationship by attachment style. Implications of an attachment perspective are discussed." (Levy & Kelly, 2010)

- - - - - -
- Bhowon, U., Ah-Kion, J. & Tseung-Wong, C. N. (2004). Jealousy in Sexual and Emotional Infidelity: A Study of Sex Differences. Gender and Behaviour,2,225-239.
- Levy, K. & Kelly, K. M. (2010). Sex Differences in Jealousy: A Contribution From Attachment Theory, Psychological Science, 21(2), 168-73
- image via