عدم مشارکت منابع دقیق از نشانه های کار نامربوط به خیانت جنسی و عاطفی

The present study tests two predictions derived from the evolutionary view of jealousy. (1) For men the disengagement of attentive resources from task-irrelevant cues to sexual infidelity is more difficult than from neutral or emotional infidelity cues. Conversely, for women the disengagement of attentive resources from task-irrelevant cues to emotional infidelity is more difficult than from neutral or sexual infidelity cues. (2) These difficulties are especially pronounced in participants currently involved in a committed romantic relationship. In each trial either an affectively neutral, an emotional infidelity or sexual infidelity distractor was simultaneously presented with a target sentence. The last trial was followed by a recall test for the targets and distractors. The results confirmed both predictions. Implications and limitations of the present study are discussed and suggestions for future research are provided.

Evolutionary psychologists view jealousy as a complex psychological mechanism that evolved because it recurrently solved an essential problem of individual reproduction in our evolutionary history: Infidelity in reproductive relationships (Daly et al., 1982 and Symons, 1979). A distinctive feature of the evolutionary view is the assumption of sex-specific evolved jealousy mechanisms because different infidelity types have recurrently threatened male and female reproductive success. Specifically, a woman’s sexual infidelity deprives her mate of a reproductive opportunity and may burden him with years of investment in a genetically unrelated child. In contrast, a man’s sexual infidelity does not burden his mate with unrelated children, but he may divert resources from his mate’s progeny. This resource threat may be signaled by his level of emotional attachment to another female. As a consequence, men’s jealousy mechanism presumably aims at the prevention of the (re-)occurrence of a mate’s sexual infidelity; in women, it presumably aims at the prevention of the (re-)occurrence of a mate’s emotional infidelity.