داوری یک کتاب از روی جلد آن: حسادت پس از انگیختگی پنهان با چهره های جذاب و غیرجذاب

The present paper focuses on the effect a rival’s facial attractiveness has on female jealousy. A parafoveal subliminal priming paradigm was employed to expose participants to rivals outside their conscious awareness. Female participants were exposed to either an attractive woman or an unattractive woman for 60 ms. They subsequently read a jealousy-evoking scenario which introduced a rival, but a description of her appearance was withheld. Our results suggest that participants have unconsciously linked the subliminally presented photograph to the rival. Women exposed to the attractive woman reported significantly more jealousy than women exposed to the unattractive rival. Moreover, they reported feeling significantly more worried, hurt, angry, and sad.

Retaining a mate who will enhance one’s genetic survival by reproducing successfully, is a major challenge most humans face. For humans, an enduring pairbond not only increases the survival chances of individuals, but also of their offspring (Fortunato & Archetti, 2010). It is therefore important to guard one’s mate from interlopers. Evolutionary psychologists hypothesize that jealousy has evolved to alert the individual to take action to guard one’s mate against intrasexual competitors and prevent them from abandoning the relationship. Because those individuals who experienced and acted on their jealous feelings were most likely to prevent the dissolution of their pairbond, it is thought jealousy has evolved as an inherited tendency (Buss et al., 2000 and Sabini and Silver, 2005). Jealousy arises when individuals perceive a threat to their relationship because of an actual or imagined rival (DeSteno and Salovey, 1996 and Dijkstra and Buunk, 2002). Because the presence of a rival is a defining and necessary condition for jealousy to arise, feelings of jealousy are assumed to be competitive in nature. The person who notices that her or his partner is attracted to a third person is likely to see this person as a rival and will experience a sense of competition. These feelings of competition instigate a social comparison process, whereby one’s traits and qualities are compared with those of the rival (DeSteno and Salovey, 1996 and Dijkstra and Buunk, 2002). Relevant to the current study, research has shown that social comparisons can take place subliminally (e.g., Stapel & Blanton, 2004), and in the current study, we assume that exposing participants to a rival on an unconscious level should evoke these competitive feelings and comparison processes as well. Comparisons with rivals will be made in particular on dimensions contributing to mate-value, that is, characteristics that make the rival an attractive potential partner for one’s mate. Rivals with a high mate-value are particularly threatening (Buss et al., 2000). Because the characteristics that would make one a desirable partner are also the characteristics that make one a threatening rival, when confronted with a rival woman should be most jealous when this rival is physically attractive, and men should be most jealous when the rival possesses status-related characteristics such as social dominance. Indeed, research has repeatedly found precisely these sex differences in the rival characteristics that evoke jealousy (Dijkstra and Buunk, 2002 and Yarab and Allgeier, 1999). Moreover, in recent research it was shown that even subliminally presented rival characteristics evoke this sex-specific jealousy (Massar and Buunk, 2009 and Massar et al., 2009). An evolutionary view on human mating and reproduction holds that when members of a species discriminate between potential mates on the basis of their physical appearance, as humans do, it is reasonable to assume that this discrimination reflects certain adaptations that were responsive to cues that indicated mate-value in human evolutionary history (Thornhill & Gangestad, 1999). Thus, choosing a physically attractive mate over a physically unattractive mate is assumed to provide reproductive benefits. Both within and across cultures, common standards of (female) facial attractiveness are shared by both men and women from different social classes (for a review see Langlois et al., 2000). This high consensus in attractiveness ratings would suggest that there are biologically based standards of beauty. Indeed, early on in human development, before cultural standards of beauty are likely to have developed, a preference for attractive faces over unattractive faces emerges (Rubenstein et al., 1999 and Slater et al., 2000). In addition, facial attractiveness has also been found to be positively related to intelligence, performance and adjustment in children (Langlois et al., 2000), and women with attractive faces have more long-term mating success and become sexually active earlier in life than women with unattractive faces (Rhodes, Simmons, & Peters, 2005). Assuming that facial attractiveness is indeed indicative of an individual’s health and reproductive fitness, an evolutionary view on mating would suggest that being attractive is especially relevant to women, because these are the characteristics men value in a mate (Buss, 1989). Because mate selection is thought to drive intrasexual selection in the opposite direction (Darwin, 1871) and because facial attractiveness is one of the main criteria men use to select a mate, it is probable that women compete with each other on this dimension. Indeed, women derogate each other’s attractiveness (Fisher, 2004), and, as mentioned before, physically attractive rivals evoke more jealousy in women than in men (Dijkstra and Buunk, 2002 and Massar et al., 2009). Given these research results, and the fact that facial attractiveness is of less importance to male intrasexual competition in the present study only women are used as participants. In view of the centrality of facial attractiveness in women’s rival evaluation and the importance of rival evaluation for one’s reproductive success, in the present research we assume that during the course of human evolution, facial attractiveness may have evolved to become perceived even outside conscious awareness. To test this assumption, in the present paper we will expose female participants subliminally to photographs of attractive or unattractive rivals. Numerous studies in social cognition suggest that people are able to evaluate subliminally presented objects or persons, and subsequently be influenced in their person judgments and attitudes by these primes (e.g., Dijksterhuis, 2004, Fazio et al., 1986 and Olson and Marshuetz, 2005). Moreover, in our own research we have found that subliminally presented physically attractive rivals evoked more jealousy than physically unattractive rivals (Massar & Buunk, 2009). In this study, participants were subliminally exposed to line drawings depicting either a woman with an ‘ideal’ waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7, or a woman with a less attractive waist-to-hip ratio of 0.9. After the subliminal priming, they read a jealousy-evoking vignette and indicated how jealous they would be. The results showed that women exposed to the attractive rival reported significantly more jealousy than women exposed to the unattractive rival. Similar results were found in a study in which we used words as subliminal primes (Massar et al., 2009) and which otherwise followed the same procedure. However, it is debatable whether words and line drawings are ecologically valid – do they represent ‘real’ rivals? Therefore, in the current study we have chosen to use photographs of attractive and unattractive women as stimuli. Given these previous results, in the present paper we predict that women will report more jealousy after subliminal exposure to a photograph of an attractive woman than after exposure to an unattractive woman. After exposure to the rival, participants are asked to imagine a jealousy-evoking situation concerning their partner and a rival. We use a jealousy slider which was developed for the previous research (Massar and Buunk, 2009 and Massar et al., 2009) to gauge participants’ jealous feelings after imagining a jealousy-evoking scenario. In addition to measuring jealousy this way, a number of jealousy-related emotions were included (DeSteno & Salovey, 1996) as dependent variables.