Evaluation of rivals in jealousy evoking situations

Prof. dr. A.P. Buunk

Results 2005

In the experiments we conducted it was investigated whether the evaluation of rivals could be an unconscious process, engaged in automatically whenever a rival is present. To this end, participants were subliminally primed with words relating to rival characteristics or with line drawings of figures with either an attractive body or an unattractive body. Immediately after the priming, participants read a jealousy inducing scenario and their jealousy was assessed.

We hypothesized that women would be more jealous after (subliminal) exposure to a physically attractive rival, and men after exposure to a socially dominant rival. Participants were exposed to the rival characteristic words for 17 milliseconds, which is too short to consciously see these words. The results indicate that participants are able to evaluate rivals without being aware of doing so: men reported more jealousy after exposure to social dominance words, and women after exposure to attractiveness words. In the first study, participants' own mate value moderated the results, such that participants with a low mate value reported more overall jealousy, and participants with a high mate value were most jealous after exposure to the sex-specific stimuli (e.g. men with a high mate value reported more jealousy after exposure to social dominance words, and women with a high mate value reported more jealousy after exposure to attractiveness words).

In a second study, women's menstrual cycle was assessed. Preliminary results show that women who were mid-cycle showed more jealousy after exposure to attractiveness words than women who were either at the beginning or the end of their cycle. More experiments need to be conducted to investigate whether women who are in the fertile period of their cycle are more sensitive to the presence of rivals, and especially to physically attractive rivals. We also plan to conduct an experiment in which male testosterone levels are assessed, as well as luteinizing hormones levels of their girlfriends. We hypothesize that males will have elevated testosterone levels when their girlfriends are mid-cycle, that is, in the most fertile period of their cycle.

An experiment using line drawings of figures with an attractive (high shoulder-to-hip ratio) or an unattractive (low shoulder-to-hip ratio) body shape as subliminal primes was also conducted. These figures were presented for 60 milliseconds to male participants, which again was too slow to consciously see and evaluate the pictures. The results show that men report more jealousy in response to the jealousy evoking scenario when they had just been primed with the figure with the attractive body shape than when they had been primed with the figure with the unattractive body shape. Thus, it seems that men can evaluate a rival's body shape without being aware of doing so.

The results from the experiments we have conducted so far indicate that men and women can evaluate rivals unconsciously, and that this evaluation has an effect on their jealousy. In future experiments, we will continue to investigate the automatic processes in jealousy and rival evaluations using methods from social cognition, such as a lexical decision and/or Stroop task.