sexual jealousy
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Abstract Beginning in the early imperial era, Chinese texts recorded instances of domestic violence perpetrated by women living in polygynous households. These acts of abuse were commonly understood to be the result of sexual jealousy. Marital disharmony was a cause of great concern to the elite, as a result of which legal and historical texts, as well as the literature of the period, provide a rich vein of evidence concerning domestic violence perpetrated by women. Furthermore, there are some surprisingly sympathetic accounts of the psychological pressures that led to such abuse by wives. As the importance of this material in the history of marital relationships and domestic life in China has been neglected, this study provides an overview of some of the key sources, particularly the recently discovered Han dynasty narrative poem, Wang Ji 妄稽.

Jealousy is defined as one of the most common automatic responses to endangering a relationship by a third party, and in evolutionary psychology it has the function of maximizing self-reproduction fitness, ensuring paternity security in men, and maintaining partner's resources in women. These include romantic jealousy, in men assuring certainty of paternity, and in women assuring the maintenance of partner's resources. Thus, according to this logic, a woman’s sexual infidelity should be more threatening for men and a man’s emotional infidelity (emotional involvement with other women than a primary partner) should be more threatening for women. Many previous studies confirm the existence of sex differences in jealousy; men reporting a higher level of sexual jealousy and women reporting a higher level of emotional jealousy. On the contrary, studies of romantic jealousy in homosexual individuals show inconsistent results. Some studies suggest that the type of sexual and emotional jealousy does not depend on the sex of the individual who is jealous, but rather on the sex of the partner or the sex of the rival. Therefore, the aim of this review is to introduce romantic jealousy from an evolutionary perspective and to acquaint the reader with current knowledge of the study of cognitive, emotional and behavioral aspects of romantic jealousy in heterosexual and homosexual men and women.

Research testing hypotheses derived from evolutionary psychology about sex differences in romantic jealousy has been hampered by a confirmationist hypothesis testing strategy. We report three studies conducted in Austria and Australia that employ a conditional hypothesis testing strategy to investigate variations in sex differences in jealousy under different relationship conditions, namely opposite-sex and same-sex infidelity among heterosexual individuals. In Study 1, heterosexual women found a same-sex sexual infidelity more aversive than heterosexual men did, and this difference persisted after adjusting for other likely predictors of this difference. In Studies 2 and 3, enhanced sexual jealousy in heterosexual men was not observed when the rival was the same sex as his partner. This effect was reversed for women, who were more distressed by sexual versus emotional infidelity when the rival was the same sex as her partner. An explanation for this set of findings, based on sex differences in sexual and attachment motivation, is proposed.

In many cultures, women are expected to cultivate a reputation for pure and chaste behavior such as wearing modest clothes and maintaining virginity before marriage. The dominant explanation for people’s support for female honor norms is that female infidelity and promiscuity threatens her male partner’s reputation and masculinity. Beyond this, the literature affords little understanding of the individual-level psychological mechanisms which produce support for female honor norms. We propose that beyond masculine reputation concerns, reproductive strategy also contribute to support for female honor norms, and that people, motivated by sexual jealousy, support female honor norms as an indirect ideological mate guarding tactic. Two correlational and three experimental studies revealed that reproductive strategies (monogamous vs. promiscuous mating orientation) predict support for female honor norms, beyond masculine honor norms, religiosity, political conservativism, and age. Support for female honor norms positively related to tendency to experience sexual jealousy (i.e., dispositional jealousy), and inducing a state of sexual jealousy increased support for female honor norms. These results applied both to men and women (albeit more strongly to men). These findings enhance understanding of the origins and maintenance of female honor norms and other ideologies that enable the control of women’s reproductive behavior.

Jealousy promotes relationship maintenance by reducing partners’ extra-pair liaisons. On average, men report higher distress about their partner’s sexual infidelity, while women show higher emotional jealousy. These sex differences are specific to heterosexuals, and to contexts with potential reproductive costs. Here we tested the effect of sex and sexual orientation of the individual, sex of the partner and of a potential rival on sexual versus emotional jealousy. In total, 416 heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual men and 1328 women from Brazil, Chile and Portugal responded the Sexual vs Emotional Jealousy Scale, and they ranked distress of four imaginative scenarios: sexual or emotional relationship of the partner with a male or a female rival. To test for effect of partners’ sex, bisexual individuals responded twice, about a female and about a male partner. Heterosexual men reported higher sexual jealousy than the other groups. Individuals were most preoccupied with their partner's emotional relationship with rival of the same sex as the respondent. Compared to other groups, heterosexual men and women were the most preoccupied with sexual infidelity. Bisexual individuals did not show any systematic differences in their jealousy type with respect to the sex of their imagined partner. Thus, jealousy is not influenced only by sex and sexual orientation of the individuals, but also by sex of the rivals: same-sex rivals are perceived as the biggest threat. Besides being a strategy to maintain a primary relationship, jealousy can also be a specific intrasexual competition strategy.