Sexual jealousy

[1] The theory proposes that a man perceives a threat to his relationship's future because he could be fooled into raising children that are not his own.

[5] Therefore, jealousy is likely to be evoked in females if they feel that their partner may leave them for another woman; this has been shown to be more likely to occur if the male commits emotional infidelity.

[3] The male reaction stereotypically manifests as the emotion of jealousy, using or threatening violence to protect sexual exclusivity, and thus the inclination to control women.

A 2012 meta-analysis found that sexual jealousy in males can also lead to emotions such as distress, hurt and disgust being experienced.

[13] Women have been found to report that their hypothetical sexual jealousy would manifest itself as anger and physical aggression towards the man.

Furthermore, statistics on domestic violence continue to show that in relationships it is primarily men who are the abusers, rather than the women.

[14] Because it is the woman who ultimately chooses the mate, aggression caused by infidelity may be directed at the rival female.

As a result, when a woman is around a suspected rival female, she may be more likely than a male counterpart to announce that her companion is "taken" and go out of her way to enhance her appearance to her spouse.

[3] Evidence for the interpretation that in jealousy situations women focus more on their own functioning as a partner comes from research by Dijkstra and Buunk (2002).

[18] Research has shown that insecure-avoidant individuals tend to report more sexual jealousy than those who are securely attached.

[22] To explain this, researchers have proposed that those in better quality, more committed relationships would have more to lose if their partner were to leave them for someone else, and therefore worry more about infidelity.

[3] Evolutionary psychologists propose that the core function of sexual jealousy is to retain access to a valuable mate.

For males, their biggest concern when they commit to a relationship is ensuring that any offspring produced is biologically theirs, therefore, sexual infidelity is a huge threat to them as there is then a chance that they are not the genetic parent.

Either way, the female loses some of the male parental investment, and the loss of her mate's resources may significantly reduce the survival of herself and her offspring.

The study concluded that sexual jealousy may be an adaptive function that is triggered in order to retain access to a valuable mate.

[23] Researchers David Buss and Todd Shackleford propose and test several hypotheses about sexual jealousy:[29]

[30] It proposes that these gender differences in feelings of sexual jealousy stem from beliefs as opposed to being evolved traits.

[33] As both forms of jealousy are threatening to men and women, the social-cognitive perspective suggests that there are no inherent, evolutionarily induced gender differences.

[4] Specifically, one study focused on seven different countries: Hungary, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Yugoslavia.

On the other hand, individuals in the American Midwest show high feelings of sexual jealousy which corresponds to the 90% disapproval of extra-marital sex.

[40] American men also feel more sexual jealousy compared to German men[41] when asked which would cause them more distress: i) a partner having formed a strong emotional attachment with another person or ii) a partner having passionate sexual intercourse with another person.

[43] Cross-cultural comparisons between China and United States reveal that, regardless of nation, men show greater sexual jealousy than women.

In contrast, between the nations, both men and women from the United States show greater sexual jealousy than Chinese individuals.

In an Indian sample, approximately fifty-one per cent of the violence towards women was due to sexual jealousy.

[46] In history, between 1880 and 1925, there was a large number of suicides amongst Indian immigrants on plantations in Fiji that reports attributed to sexual jealousy.

[49] In polygamous societies, men feel greater sexual jealousy when there is low paternity certainty.