Men get jealous over sexual infidelity while women over emotions

Washington, Sept 18 : A new study has revealed that men and women react differently to adultery, as men are more concerned about sexual infidelity and women about emotional infidelity.

The new research, based on the TV show 'Cheaters', which captures actual infidelities on video, suggests that a man will ask a woman if she had sex with the other man, whereas a woman will ask if he loved the other woman.

The general explanation for this is centred on the evolutionary drive of men to have kids whom they know are their own, and women don't want their mate's care and attention to be diverted to their potential rivals.

'Cheaters', which aims to chronicle real-life love triangles involving victims, cheaters and interlopers, has been on air since 2000 and was a movie before the TV show, which inspired the researcher of the study Barry Kuhle.

Kuhle and his colleagues analysed 51 episodes of the show with 75 cases of victims interrogating cheaters — 45 female victims and 30 male victims.

They discovered male victims asked cheaters about sex, asking questions like "Did you have sex with him?" about 57 percent of the time, and female victims did so just 29 percent of the time, whereas female victims asked about emotion with questions such as "Do you love her?" in 71 percent of cases as compared to just 43 percent male victims.

"The emotion of jealousy shows clear evidence of evolution's fingerprints," Kuhle told Live Science.

"Natural selection has designed men to be acutely sensitive to being cuckolded and women to losing their partner's time, attention and resources. Our skulls house a Stone Age mind in a modern-day world.

"Actual jealous behaviour from men and women who have actually been cheated on conforms to evolutionary psychological expectations and dovetails perfectly with research done previously that asked people to anticipate how they would behave in these circumstances," he stated.

Dr Kuhle has cautioned that these findings show only a tendency for differences between the sexes and that "every man and every woman did not conform to this pattern", his only concern regarding the work being whether the televised instances of infidelity were staged or not.

The findings of the study have been published in the 26th August edition of the online journal Personality and Individual Differences.