389-406 Cramer Aug 08.indd

According to an evolutionary psychology perspective, men’s and women’s processing of threats to their sex-linked mate selection strategies cause sex differences in infidelity distress. An alternative account assumes that the distress results from men’s and women’s processing of expectation violations regarding the content of an unfaithful partner’s actions with a rival. Logistic regressions supported the conclusion that the participant’s sex—but not the processing of expectation violations—was the best predictor of the most distressing infidelity presented in forced-choice, mutually exclusive, and combined formats. Our results also indicated that the sex differences in infidelity distress were neither limited to using data from a forced-choice response format nor caused by the distinct inferences that men and women draw about the relation between love and sex.