The Effects of Sample Characteristics and Experience with Infidelity on Romantic Jealousy

Abstract

Past research has suggested that men are more upset by imagined sexual than emotional infidelity, and women are more upset by imagined emotional infidelity than sexual infidelity. However, experience with infidelity, methodology, and age and gender of the sample may help to explain inconsistent results. Two hundred ninety-four English-speaking undergraduate students and 325 noncollege adults in a large mid-Atlantic urban area of the U. S. completed forced-choice or continuous-scale anonymous questionnaires regarding jealousy over a mate's hypothetical infidelity. Chi-square and MANOVA analyses replicated previous findings of the expected gender difference in all hypothetical forced-choice scenarios. However, results for those participants who reported experience with actual infidelity demonstrated little support for the traditional evolutionary model, as there were no gender differences in which aspect of hypothetical infidelity was reported to be more distressing, and no gender differences at the college level in terms of which aspect of infidelity received the greatest focus. These findings, extrapolated from both undergraduates and adults and accounting for the impact of actual, primed memory of experience of infidelity on hypothetical jealousy scenarios, raise important questions about the validity of hypothetical scenarios of jealousy as proxies for real reactions to actual infidelity. The results of the present study suggest that the lack of a consistent, replicable gender difference across the lifespan may be explained by two related factors: age and actual experience with infidelity.

Gender differences in response to infidelity types and rival attractiveness

“…Further, the experience of personal infidelity or a partner's infidelity may also influence infidelity imagination; in other words, whether or not individuals had experienced partner infidelity affected their responses regarding their partner's infidelity (e.g. Harris, 2003b;Tagler, 2010;Varga, Gee, & Munro, 2011). The experience rates of partner infidelity in Western cultures are generally higher than in Asian cultures.…”

Once a Cheater, Always a Cheater? Serial Infidelity Across Subsequent Relationships

“…Women and men may also vary in their emotional responses to perceived partner ESI; men tend to report a greater degree of jealousy and distress in response to partner infidelity and to be more threatened by sexual rather than emotional infidelity of their female partners, whereas women report more distress in response to emotional infidelity of their male partners (Edlund, Heider, Scherer, Farc, & Sagarin, 2006; Frederick & Fales, 2016; Harris & Christenfeld, 1996). However, some research has demonstrated that age and prior experiences with partner ESI moderate these findings (Varga, Gee, & Munro, 2011), and that gender discrepancies in general may be decreasing in younger cohorts (Atkins, Baucom, & Jacobson, 2001; Fincham & May, 2017; Mark et al, 2011). Thus, age may be another key factor in understanding risk for infidelity.…”

Is Jealousy Danger or Escape in Partnerships in the Middle of Life?

“…Они рассматривались в рамках дискус-сии между сторонниками эволюцион-ной теории и социально-когнитивной теории Varga, Gee, Munro, 2011;Ward, Voracek, 2004;. В данной дискуссии о половых различиях в восприятии двух видов не-верности эти теории выглядят противо-положными, однако те же теории могут рассматриваться и как взаимодополняю-щие .…”

“…Эти различные ре-акции основаны не только на различ-ной роли партнеров в репродуктивном процессе, но и на процессах атрибу-ции чувств и действий каждого, которые, в свою очередь, зависят от социальных норм, образцов и ожиданий. Кроме того некоторые половые различия романти-ческой ревности могут быть объяснены возрастными особенностями и разным опытом реальной неверности (Varga, Gee, Munro, 2011).…”