Study: Jealousy Is (Literally) Blinding

AUTHOR: Jessica Bennett

PUBLICATION NAME: Newsweek

DATE OF PUBLICATION: April 13th, 2010

SUMMARY: David Buss, a psychologist from the University of Texas, wrote a book called The Dangerous Passion in which he explained how jealously could actually expose partners in relationships to "extreme dangers".

In a research at the University of Delaware with twenty-five different couples that was published in the April issue of the American Psychological Association journal Emotion, the women became so overcome with jealously with their partners that they could not concentrate on the targets that were appearing on their computer screen. The study consisted of the men and women sitting next to each other on two different computer screens. The men were told to look at graphic pictures of women while rating their attractiveness. The women were told to look at a series of rapid images and asked to point on the images of landscapes. The women that became so jealous could only concentrate on what their partners were looking at and how they rated each picture and not on finding the targets on their own computer. So in this way "jealousy was blinding". The two authors of the journal Emotion, Steven Most and Jean-Philippe Laurenceau, said “the influence of social emotions—known to affect moods, behaviors and physical health—appears to permeate so deeply as to affect processes involved in visual awareness.”

This experiment was not tested on men. Meaning, they did not have the men and women switch roles. Researchers suggest that if this same study were to be done on males, the results would be very similar.

LINKS TO STUDY: No links to original study were available.

ARTICLE: http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/the-human-condition/2010/04/13/study-jealousy-is-literally-blinding.html

SUBMITTED BY: Meera Narayanan