Abstract

Romantic jealousy is a sexually -differentiated emotion designed to secure reproductive liaisons. However, some suggest that sexual differences observed in the kind of infidelity that triggers jealousy cross-culturally could be only an artifact of attachment, shaping the masculine mind to develop a dismissing/avoidant attachment style, while the feminine attachment style is more likely to be anxious. This assumption was tested on a sample of 88 men and 170 women from Chile. The kind of infidelity that was more distressing was compared by sex and attachment style. As expected, results showed that men feel more jealousy distress by sexual infidelity scenario, while women by emotional infidelity scenario. However, Logistic Regressions did not support the proposition that attachment style may underlie sex differences in jealousy, because sex was the only significant predictors of the kind of jealousy that was more distressing. The discussion addresses the consistency of the evolved jealousy mechanism as plastic, but opened to specific contextual inputs other than attachment style