Jealousy: Impact Of Sexual And Emotional Infidelity

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RESEARCH ON JEALOUSY: IMPACT OF SEXUAL VS. EMOTIONAL INFIDELITY Researchers at Chapman University have completed the largest study to date into the effects of sexual and emotional infidelity on jealousy finding that men and women respond differently. Jealousy can cause marital breakup, violence, and heartache and understanding the causes may help ameliorate the effects. Over sixty thousand people aged between eighteen and sixty-five with an average age of 35 to 40 were interviewed as to what their feelings would be should their partner commit either sexual or emotional infidelity. The results showed that heterosexual men were more likely to be jealous if their partner committed sexual infidelity 65% compared to 35% of heterosexual women. Heterosexual …show more content…

Empathy is our ability to share and feel other peoples emotions and is receiving a lot of attention as it is seen as being part of other problems such as Autism. The research was first carried out on mice and having noted that the stress of a strange mouse would diminish empathetic ability they moved to using human subjects. The researchers used pain as a measure of empathy between students that were asked to immerse their arms in ice cold water. They noted that friends pain levels increased because they were able to feel the others pain. When strangers did the same there was no corresponding increase in pain, The researcher then administered to pairs of strangers, metyrapone, a drug which diminishes the effect of the flight-or-fight response. The drug's effect was to allow strangers to empathize with each other, sharing each others pain. The next stage in the experiment was to examine the effect of reducing the social stress of strangers. Strangers were asked to play a collaborative video game together for fifteen minutes. The result after only fifteen minutes showed that their level of empathy towards the other person increased as shown by their pain …show more content…

The effects of the environment in causing depression has led researchers to use Gene-by-Environment (GxE) methods to try to identify genes that may change the effects of the environment in causing depression. Dunn reports that the results here are conflicting and not conclusive. Dunn suggests that there is a need for large-scale studies combining both GWAS and GxE methods to find the multiple genetic factors that cause