Gender Differences in Jealousy - Lab Report Example

Gender differences in jealousy People from their nature have developed through years mechanisms in order to adapt and overcome any dysfunctional or undesired situation. These situations might be problems of survival, mating parenting and many others. Individuals develop these psychological mechanisms initially directed toward the solution of every problem, and it is on average a successful solution. For example, when an individual notices cues that imply the partner’s potential infidelity, he/she perceives that as an adaptive problem and the output of the sexual jealousy mechanism is geared toward solving that problem (Paul & Galloway (1994). Jealousy in general is an emotion which typically refers to negative thoughts and feelings of insecurity and trepidation of losing particularly important values to the self, like a significant other or a relationship. It consists of many feelings, like anger, disgust or sadness (Harris & Christenfeld, 1996). One other aspect is that men are likely to invest all of their resources to the children, but if a man is cuckolded, he risks of losing his investment in another’s man’s child, so it is paternal uncertainty which plays also an important role. For all these reasons and many others that will be examined shortly, this study aims to explore the field of gender differences in jealousy (Bjorklund & Schackelford, 1999). Penke and Asendorpf (2008) have demonstrated more specifically that women are more worried toward the emotional infidelity because they don’t want to lose the paternal investment of their offspring, and men are more worried toward sexual infidelity, because they want to avoid investing to an unrelated offspring. This occurs because only females have faced the problem of resource withdrawal, and males but not females faced the problem of cuckoldry (Penke & Asendorpf, 2008) & (DeSteno & Salovey, 1996). As previous research has shown, self-esteem is an important indicator of how much an individual can be jealous, and also for what reasons. For instance, women are found to be more concerned about the physical attractiveness of the rival, especially when they have lower self-esteem scores. Moreover, women experience more jealousy in response to an attractive rival, than in response to an unattractive one. In contrast, men tend to be more jealous when they have to compete to a socially dominant rival, than with a non-dominant one, so the status related characteristics are much more important for the degree in which men experience jealousy (Buunk & Dijkstra, 2004). Buunk and Dijkstra (2004) also noted the sex differences in the two types of jealousy, but they suggested that these differences may not occur when rating scales instead of a forced- choice questionnaire. Although in real life it may be difficult to distinguish between sexual or emotional infidelity, when a partner is facing a “pure” emotional infidelity, the rival will be evaluated more as a potential threat, so the partner will be scared that the relationship might end, so jealousy will be more intense. Furthermore, the partner gives much more importance to the rival characteristics, because they may reflect importance of long-term partner preferences. Thus, when a man is faced with a partner who is deeply emotionally involved with another person, it is more expected to become jealous due to the rival’s social dominance, than women who are more expected to become jealous because of the rival’s physical attractiveness. But the findings imply that when it is about sexual contact and not emotional involvement, men are more jealous about physical attractiveness than about social status. Whereas for women, sexual contact is less important, so sexual infidelity in which emotional involvement is excluded, and women will be less influenced by the rival’s physical characteristics, and social dominance will be as unimportant as in emotional infidelity (Buunk & Dijkstra, 2004). DeSteno and Salovey have found that emotional infidelity results in more distress in women than in men, like every other study in the field, and also men showed extensive increases in electrodermal activity when they were asked to imagine the sexual infidelity, rather than when they imagined the emotional infidelity. One explanation of that is the double-shot hypothesis which states that emotional and sexual infidelity are often correlated because an individual is more probable to have sex with someone they have feelings for, and vice versa (DeSteno & Salovey, 1996). But men and women differ in their beliefs about that correlation. Women more often believe that a man can be sexually involved with a woman without having any feelings for her, but they are afraid that his emotional involvement implies also a sexual one, maybe in the future. Men on the other hand believe that women can have sex with someone only if they have firstly developed feelings for him, and secondly they might think that a woman can fall in love more easily with a man, without having already sexual intercourse with him. Consequently, the probable different beliefs of men and women might be one of the major reasons why they respond differently to which type of infidelity is more stressful. As it is been realized, gender differences in the context of jealousy is a large field of studies, since many decades, and it still needs further exploration. In this study we will examine attitudes toward infidelity depending on gender, and we are going to see the frequency of the possible sex differences. In particular, in Likert-scale questionnaire, we expect to find gender differences in both subscales (sexual and emotional) ; men will score higher than women for the sexual subscale, and women will score higher comparing to men, for the emotional subscale. In Forced-choice scale, we anticipate significant differences on all six dilemmas for both sexes; frequencies will be lower for sexual distress than for emotional distress for females, and vice versa for men. Furthermore, it is expected that there will be differences between males and females. Method Participants In this study participated 23 undergraduate psychology students. There were 17 females and six males. Their race varied from Greek, Bulgarian or Romanian. The ages ranged from 19 to 29 years old. Participating in the study was part of the requirements for a specific psychology class, so it was a convenient sample. The participants were heterosexuals. Materials For this study, it has been used the Likert-like actual infidelity scale by Edlund (2006), and the adaptation of Buss (1999) forced choice Infidelity Dilemma questionnaire by Shackerfold (2004). The first is a questionnaire which firstly makes the participant imagine their partner’s emotional and sexual infidelity, and then asking them which of the two is more upsetting for them. The second is a questionnaire in which there is a scale from 1 (not at all) to 7 (completely), and the statements of the questionnaire refer to one’s attitude towards their partner infidelity, such us “to what degree would you experience jealousy over the emotional aspects of your partner’s imagined infidelity?”, and they measure the frequency of the gender differences. Procedure The study took place in a classroom setting with computers. The instructor provided the students with two different measures of distress about partner’s infidelity. By following the instructions of the lecturer, each participant scores in sexual and emotional subscale of the Likert-like scale and the events questionnaire, and they type the data into SPSS file, conducting descriptive, independent samples t-test and Chi-square, with the aim of finding the differences between the groups in both subscales, and also in order to find any differences between males and females in each dilemma. Findings : The results seem to corroborate the fact that menfolk were more likely to manifest more suspicion of women mate’s sexual predations. Statistically speaking, t(146) = 3.76, p Read More