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Emotional Infidelity And Gender Analysis

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Over the course of evolution, men and women have developed different emotional responses to unfaithfulness in relationships. Since men often have less parental investment and are more concerned about reproduction itself and the passing of genes, they won’t be as emotionally upset due to infidelity, but rather would be sexually jealous if their partner was cheating. On the other hand, women tend to be more involved in parenting, thus making it more difficult to raise offspring without their male counterpart, making them more emotionally offended when their partner cheats. (Buss, Larsen, Westen & Semmelroth, 1992). The degree to which different ranges of emotions occur in men versus woman have also been studied. Previous research indicates that …show more content…

This gave each participant a “Sexual minus Emotional Distress Difference Score”. The mean score for men was 0.077 (SD=1.647), and for women the mean score was -0.14 (SD=1.429). This indicates that men on average were slightly more sexually distressed than emotionally distressed, and women were slightly more emotionally distressed versus sexually. This is in line with the hypothesis, with men showing stronger response to sexual infidelity and women showing stronger response to emotional infidelity, at least in terms of feelings of distress. The T-test for these scores among men and women was t(74) = .572, p = .568. Based on this, there was not a significant difference between men and women for the difference between sexual and emotional …show more content…

Running this study again with a larger group would likely lead to more accurate assessment. Additionally, the overall lack of racial diversity in the sample may have adjusted the data since it is likely that a large proportion of the participants were raised with similar values and perceptions of emotional and sexual relationships. This issue may be attested to the fact that the overall composition of the student body at this college lacks significant diversity; this particular sample of students was fairly proportional to the population of the college as a whole. Finally, the methods used in no way distinguished for different sexual orientations within the two genders. How infidelity is viewed among heterosexuals versus other sexual orientations certainly may differ from each other and could be an interesting idea to pursue in future

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