John Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
It may be hard for modern people who consider themselves intellectually sensitive to be told that we are emotionally no better than our early ancestors were. Surely we have been able to throw off the shackles of our evolutionary history and allow intelligence to triumph–right?
Yeah, right.
Discovery’s Trace Dominguez explains that jealousy is not only still prevalent (duh), but likely to be a hangover from the earliest days of humanity, when we lived solely in Africa.
It also has its roots in basically the same things it does today: suspicion, envy, mistrust, anxiety, and protective possession. Males guarded the social group and found food while females maintained social structure and raised offspring. Thus, male jealousy is the result of wanting to protect their own genetic interests by making sure females weren’t, ehem, “mixing” with other males while they were out trying to keep everyone alive.
Females, on the other hand, felt they and their offspring were betrayed if a male went off and shared resources with other females.
Pretty run-of-the-mill, you-knew-this-without-having-to-watch-a-video stuff.
But, as always, it isn’t that simple
According to a study out of Chapman University, which featured responses from 64,000 Americans, motivations for romantic and sexual jealousy still vary depending on gender and sexual orientation. The research found that straight men were more jealous about physical infidelity, whereas other groups–straight women and homosexual men and women–found emotional infidelity more troubling.
The study was published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, and according to Time it asked basic biographical information such as income, marital history and sexual orientation, as well as prompting the participants to choose (whether from imagination or personal experience) if they’d be hurt more by sex cheating or love cheating, to be prehistorically blunt.
Psychologist and lead author David Frederick explained, “Heterosexual men really stand out from all other groups. They were the only ones more likely to be most upset by sexual infidelity.”
Outcomes also didn’t change between variables: marital status, a history of being cheated on, income, the length of relationship, or whether a respondent had children or not.
Younger participants of both sexes also reported more distress at being cheated on physically.
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