Effects of sexual imagination, relationship experience, and personal infidelity experiences on gender differences in responses to partners’ infidelity

ABSTRACT

The sexual imagination hypothesis predicts that gender differences in jealousy emerge from the differences in explicit imagination between men and women. In particular, men strongly respond to partners’ sexual infidelity because they can imagine sexual stimuli explicitly. In contrast, women strongly respond to emotional infidelity because they can effortlessly envision emotional infidelity. We hypothesised that higher sexual and romantic imaginations were associated with greater distress over partners’ sexual and emotional infidelity, respectively. Participants (226 women and 135 men) answered questions regarding experiences with personal sexual and emotional infidelity and the degree of distress they felt over their partners’ sexual and emotional infidelity. They completed the scales for sexual and romantic imaginations. Multiple regression analyses showed that the sexual imagination hypothesis provided a unique explanation for gender differences in jealousy beyond the effects of gender, including relationship experience and experiences with personal sexual and emotional infidelity. Additionally, individuals with relationship experience and experiences with personal sexual and emotional infidelity reported higher sexual and romantic imaginations than those without such experiences. Furthermore, our findings imply that responses to partners’ infidelity, considering gender, are more similar than different.

KEYWORDS:

• Infidelity
• gender similarity
• relationship status
• sexual imagination hypothesis
• evolutionary psychology

Author contributions

Tsukasa Kato: All works, including conceptualisation, funding acquisition, all writing, data curation, methodology, formal analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data sharing and Declaration

The data are available from the author upon reasonable request.

Ethnical approval

All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with APA ethical guidelines for the participation of human subjects, the ethical standards of the Toyo University institutional review board, and the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all participants included in this study.