Two studies tested the predictions that the disconfirmation of the prospect of a mate’s sexual infidelity generates more intense relief in men than in women, whereas the disconfirmation of the prospect of a mate’s emotional infidelity generates more intense relief in women than in men. Additionally, the intensity of relief was predicted to increase with the likelihood of infidelity. The partici...

Substantial sex differences in emotional responses and perception have been reported in previous psychological and psychophysiological studies. For example, women have been found to respond more strongly to negative emotional stimuli, a sex difference that has been linked to an increased risk of depression and anxiety disorders. The extent to which such sex differences are reflected in correspo...

Although available evidence suggests that the emotional valence and recollective properties of autobiographical memories (AMs) may be influenced by personality- and sex-related differences, overall these relationships remain poorly understood. The present study investigated these issues by comparing the effect of general personality traits (extraversion and neuroticism) and specific traits link...

PURPOSE This study had two aims: (1) to determine the prevalence of five categories of retrospectively reported childhood maltreatment in an adult community sample and (2) to examine relationships between three theoretically and practically chosen demographic variables and childhood maltreatment. METHOD Participants were a representative sample of 967 adult men and women in the metropolitan M...

INTRODUCTION Recently it has been shown that acute sleep loss has a direct impact on emotional processing in healthy individuals. Here we studied the effect of chronically disturbed sleep on emotional processing by investigating two samples of patients with sleep disorders. METHODS 25 patients with psychophysiologic insomnia (23 women and 2 men, mean age: 51.6 SD; 10.9 years), 19 patients wit...

Three studies measured psychophysiological reactivity (heart rate, blood pressure, and electrodermal activity) while participants imagined a mate's infidelity. The specific innate modular theory of gender differences in jealousy hypothesizes that men are upset by sexual infidelity and women are upset by emotional infidelity, because of having faced different adaptive challenges (cuckoldry and l...

Several theorists have claimed that men are innately more upset by a mate's sexual infidelity and women are more upset by a mate's emotional infidelity because the sexes faced different adaptive problems (for men, cuckoldry; for women, losing a mate's resources). The present work examined this theory of jealousy as a specific innate module in 196 adult men and women of homosexual and heterosexu...