A study on cheating found that men care more about sexual aspects, while women fret over emotional connection.
Romantic jealousy seems to have a gender divide when it comes to cheating: Men typically ask more questions about the sexual aspects of an affair while women inquire more about emotional infidelity, a new study finds.
The study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, used a modern-day phenomenon — the reality TV show “Cheaters” — to explore an age-old issue — jealousy-fueled interrogations of infidelity.
Student coders viewed 102 cases of “love triangle” confrontations between the cheater, the victim, and the person they were fooling around with. They analyzed whether a victim’s comments to the two-timer represented sexual jealousy (Was she/he better in bed than me? How many times did you have sex with her/him?) or emotional jealousy (Do you love him/her? Who do you love more?).
The research found that women, by contrast, only asked about the intimate details 29 percent of the time. And when the ladies were the victims, 71 percent of their questions centered on the emotional side of their mate’s fling, versus 43 percent of men’s inquiries.
“Relative to women, men are more distressed by sexual infidelity, and women are more upset over emotional infidelity, relative to men,” says study author Barry X. Kuhle, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Scranton in Scranton, Penn.
Read more@ msnbc
