An ERP Study On Gender Differences In Romantic Jealousy Among Chinese College Students

Romantic jealousy is essentially a kind of jealousy in relationship that exists in a tripartite relationship—that is,a negative emotional experience generated by the individual himself when a certain intimate relationship between an individual and another person is damaged by the appearance of a third party.Romantic jealousy is made up of emotional reactions about mate’s emotional infidelity and sexual infidelity.The existing literature had suggested that there are significant gender differences in romantic jealousy,i.e.,males are more likely to be jealous of their mate’s sexual infidelity,and females are more likely to be jealous of their mate’s emotional infidelity.And several scholars explained this gender difference pattern(i.e.,males are more likely to be jealous of their mate’s sexual infidelity because of their own genetic transmission;females are more likely to be jealous of their mate’s emotional infidelity because of their own the availability of resources for parenting offspring.)through evolutionary perspectives.Previous relevant studies mostly made participants judge whether the romantic jealousy induced by the mate’s emotional and sexual infidelity was strong or weak by using the forced-choice paradigm.This either-or method may not have a good ecological validity.Most of these studies are restricted to Western cultural societies,and it is unclear whether the results of this study can be applied to the eastern cultural subjects.Moreover,previous studies mostly are confined to the behavioral research paradigm and can’t be able to reveal the basis of brain function relevant to gender differences in romantic jealousy.Based on above reasons,the current study selected Chinese participants as the experimental participants and used the classic either-or method and the continuous Likert Scale Method to measure the subject’s emotional response to the events of inducing romantic jealousy.Meanwhile,this study examined the gender differences and corresponding brain mechanism evidence of romantic jealousy reactions in Chinese cultural context from the behavioral level and EEG level through a behavioral experiment and an ERP experiment.Experiment 1 used the methods of continuous measurement and dichotomy to measure the participants’romantic jealousy reactions to hypothetical mate’s infidelity(emotional infidelity vs.sexual infidelity),and also examined the intensity of emotional reactions of the participants of different genders on two types of reference behaviors(positive behavior vs.non-infidelity negative behavior).Experimental results showed that there was no significant gender difference in the dichotomy method.On the continuous measurement method,the emotional reaction of female participants to the above four types of hypothetical mate’s behavior was significantly higher than that of male participants.The emotional reactions induced by sexual infidelity was significantly higher than that of emotional infidelity in both male and female participants.In order to understand the effect of the participants’ emotional processing ability on the scores of romantic jealousy,the emotional scores of the positive behavior and non-infidelity negative behavior were used as covariates to examine their moderating effects on the main effect of gender in the experimental design of gender × types of events(emotional infidelity vs.sexual infidelity),and it was found that the latter could clearly eliminate the main effect of gender,indicating that female’s emotional processing ability,especially the negative emotion processing ability,could explain why they showed a higher jealous emotional reactions than male in infidelity behavior.Overall,the results of the experiment 1 showed that female’s expectations of mate loyalty were comparable to that of male under the Chinese culture,and both of them reacted more strongly to sexual infidelity,which was significantly different from the results of previous studies in Western culture.And this might reflect that the characteristics of psychological appeals after increasing female’s social and economic status under the contemporary Chinese culture of equal rights for males and females.Experiment 2 further used ERP techniques to examine the participants’(male vs.female)differences in brain activation patterns in processing romantic jealousy reactions to hypothetical mate’s infidelity behavior(emotional infidelity vs.sexual infidelity).The behavioral results repeated the findings of Experiment 1,i.e.,participants reacted significantly higher to sexual infidelity than to emotional infidelity,and female reacted significantly higher to romantic jealousy reactions to both emotional and sexual infidelity than male.The ERP results were as follows:(1)there was no significant gender difference in the N100 component(50-150ms),and the infidelity event induced a significant right brain activation pattern(i.e.,right brain activation>left brain activation).The results showed that in the early time window of about 100ms,both male and female participants can quickly react to the negativity of infidelity behaviors,thus they showed a right brain activation pattern preponderated in processing negative information.(2)there was no significant gender difference in the P300 component(210～350ms),and the infidelity behaviors induced a significant left brain activation pattern(i.e.,left brain activation>right brain activation),and the brain activation of the frontal and parietal lobe areas was significantly higher than that of the temporal lobe area.The results showed that in the medium-term time window of 300ms,both male and female participants showed the same emotional processing pattern induced by infidelity events.(3)there were significant gender differences in LPP components(500～800ms),the brain activation in female was significantly higher than that in male;and in general,the brain activation of the right brain areas of the participants was significantly higher than that of the left brain areas.The results showed that the female participants possessed a continuous lag intensity in the processing of negative emotions of infidelity behaviors compared to male participants in the late time window,and this lagged patterns in the processing of negative emotion could explain why they were significantly higher than male participants in terms of the emotional scores of infidelity behaviors.Based on the above two experiments,we found that female’s demands for their mate’s loyalty was comparable that of male in the college students in the contemporary Chinese social and cultural environment.It’s that female’s emotions possessed a continuous lag intensity in processing infidelity behaviors,thus showing stronger emotional reactions.The results of the current study are more appropriately explained by the characteristics of female’s psychological appeal under the social,economic and cultural background with high level of gender equality rather than the theory of evolution.