Sex differences in the contexts of extreme jealousy

Research on sex differences in jealousy using continuous measures sometimes reveals that women report more intense jealousy than men in response to both sexual and emotional infidelity. Two studies tested whether these findings might have stemmed from sex differences in the interpretation of the upper anchor of the jealousy scales (e.g., ‘‘extremely jealous’’). In Study 1, women and men offered different types of exemplars when describing situations in which they felt extremely jealous. A significantly greater proportion of women than men reported feeling extreme jealousy in the context of romantic relationships. Additional results demonstrated that women and men confuse the terms ‘‘jealousy’’ and ‘‘envy,’’ although this confusion cannot account for the sex differences in the contexts of extreme jealousy. Study 2 demonstrated that the sex difference in the intensity of reported jealousy disappears if the upper anchor of the scale is modified to include specific contextual information (e.g., ‘‘as jealous as you could feel in a romantic relationship’’). Do women feel jealousy more intensely than men? According to Buss (1999), the weight of past evidence would suggest not: ‘‘Prior to studies by evolutionary psychologists, dozens of empirical studies explored the psychology of jealousy. The most common finding was that men and women do not differ in either the frequency or the magnitude of the jealousy they experience’’ (p. 325; see also Buunk & Hupka, 1987; White, 1981). Evolutionary psychologists did not dispute the equivalence of women and men’s overall experience of jealousy, but they theorized that the sexes would differ in the types of infidelity that would elicit greater jealousy. On the basis of the theory that male sexual jealousy evolved as an adaptive solution to the specter of paternal