Research on romantic jealousy and self-esteem mostly relies on the measurement of explicit (i.e., conscious, deliberate) aspects, without taking recent developments of the measurement of implicit (i.e., automatic) aspects into account. In this study (N = 154), we applied several measures of romantic jealousy and self-esteem (explicit, implicit), finding sex-specific as well as measurement-specific effects. Men (but not women) higher in jealousy had lower explicit self-esteem, whereas women (but not men) higher in jealousy had higher implicit self-esteem, but only when using the Implicit Association Test (whereas not the Initial Preference Task) for measuring implicit self-esteem. Individuals with damaged (i.e., low explicit and high implicit) self-esteem were more jealous than those with fragile (i.e., high explicit and low implicit) self-esteem. This differential effect was due to higher implicit self-esteem among women, whereas lower explicit self-esteem among men. These novel findings not only add to the expanding literature on romantic jealousy research, but also to research on self-esteem discrepancies.
Jealousy is a fundamental human emotion (Buss, 2000). It is part of our lives from childhood to old age and intensified in romantic relationships (Salovey, 1991). A bulk of research has analyzed different aspects of romantic and sexual jealousy; for example, jealousy in interpersonal situations or jealous reactions in response to sexual vs. emotional infidelity (Buss et al., 1992 and Buunk, 1995). Since the seminal paper of Buss and colleagues (1992), sex differences in jealousy have been repeatedly investigated. Men (compared to women) show more distress by partners’ sexual infidelity, whereas women (compared to men) more distress by partners’ emotional infidelity. This effect is due to the sexes’ different adaptive problems in mating contexts, with which humans have been faced throughout evolutionary history (cuckoldry among men vs. loss of partner investment in offspring among women).
Jealousy can be best described as a combination of different emotions like hurt, anxiety, and anger (Parrott & Smith, 1993), and it seems to be mediated by threatened self-esteem (DeSteno, Valdesolo, & Bartlett, 2006). Self-esteem develops in interactions with our social environment by the evaluations and perceptions of others (i.e., the “sociometer”; Leary, Tambor, Terdal, & Downs, 1995). Experiencing partner interest in someone else threatens the relationship as well as an important determinant of self-esteem – the social interaction with significant others, such as the romantic partner. This threatens one’s self-esteem and in turn jealousy arises (DeSteno et al., 2006).
Apart from this process-oriented model, self-esteem also seems to be directly related to romantic jealousy, such that low self-esteem is associated with higher jealousy (Mullen and Martin, 1994 and Rydell and Bringle, 2007). All in all, this research line on jealousy and self-esteem has almost exclusively relied on direct (i.e., questionnaire-based) measures, without taking into account the recent developments of measuring implicit (i.e., automatic) aspects.
Since Greenwald and Banaji (1995), it is assumed that psychological aspects like self-esteem not only have explicit (i.e., conscious, habitual) parts, but also implicit (i.e., automatic) ones. Hence, it is fitting to use indirect measurement procedures (measuring implicit aspects) together with direct measurements (capturing explicit aspects). Indeed, research on jealousy has already applied indirect measurement procedures to measure implicit aspects (e.g., implicit self-esteem: DeSteno et al., 2006; or implicit evaluations of attractive same-sex targets: Maner, Miller, Rouby, & Gailliot, 2009), but research along these lines still is scarce.
Implicit self-esteem has been used in experimental designs to analyze short-term effects of jealousy-inducing situations on implicit self-esteem (DeSteno et al., 2006). However, to our knowledge no study to date has analyzed trait aspects of self-esteem (explicit and implicit) and jealousy in more detail. Furthermore, recent research (Jordan, Spencer, Zanna, Hoshino-Browne, & Coreel, 2003) has suggested a dual separation of self-esteem into concordant and discrepant self-esteem styles. Individuals with concordant self-esteem have either high explicit and high implicit self-esteem (i.e., secure high self-esteem) or low explicit and low implicit self-esteem (i.e., secure low self-esteem). In a similar vein, individuals with discordant self-esteem can also be divided into two subtypes: those with high implicit and low explicit self-esteem (i.e., damaged self-esteem) vs. those with low implicit and high explicit self-esteem (i.e., defensive or fragile self-esteem). Especially, in clinical samples, damaged self-esteem has frequently been found among individuals suffering from psychological distress (i.e., frequently showing low explicit self-esteem), such as in depression with suicidal ideation ( Franck, De Raedt, Dereu, & Van den Abbeele, 2007), bulimia nervosa ( Cockerham, Stopa, Bell, & Gregg, 2009), or alexithymia ( Dentale, San Martini, De Coro, & Di Pomponio, 2010).
The theoretical framework accounting for the emergence of such self-esteem discrepancies is still under debate. Explanations range from normal attitude change (Jordan et al., 2003) to an “automatic threat-defense mechanism”, according to which individuals automatically increase their implicit self-esteem in order to defend against threats (Rudman, Dohn, & Fairchild, 2007).
