VOLUME 18 #2

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Golinkoff and grandchildren
Photo by Kathy F. Atkinson

RESEARCH | Jealousy really is “blinding,” according to a new study by two psychology professors who say the results surprised even them. They found that women who were made to feel jealous were so distracted by unpleasant emotional images that they became unable to spot targets they were trying to find.

The researchers, Steven Most (far right) and Jean-Philippe Laurenceau, suggest that their results reveal something profound about social relationships and perception: It has long been known that the emotions involved in social relationships affect mental and physical health, but now it appears that social emotions can literally affect what we see.

“We didn’t believe it at first,” Most says. “We thought it was a fluke. So we ran the experiment again and got almost exactly the same correlation” between levels of jealousy and difficulties in perception.

He acknowledges that there appears to be “a big gap” between emotional reactions and the kinds of physical activities that occur in the brain and the eyes to create perception. “But as it turns out, that seems to be a very real relationship,” he says.

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The research appeared in the April issue of the journal Emotion, published by the American Psychological Association. For the study, Laurenceau, Most and their colleagues devised an experiment in which they tested heterosexual couples.

First, the romantic partners sat near each other at separate computers. The woman was asked to detect targets (pictures of landscapes) amid rapid streams of images, while trying to ignore occasional emotionally unpleasant (gruesome or graphic) images.

The man was asked to rate the attractiveness of landscapes that appeared on his screen. After about 10 minutes, it was announced that the male partner would now be shown photos of other single women rather than of landscapes and would be asked to rate their attractiveness. The woman participating in the experiment was told to continue her previous task of detecting particular images.

At the end, the women were asked how uneasy they had felt about their partner rating other women’s attractiveness.

The finding? The more jealous the women felt, the more they were so distracted by unpleasant images that they could not see the targets for which they were searching. This relationship between jealousy and “emotion-induced blindness” emerged only during the second part of the experiment—when the male partner was rating other women—helping to rule out baseline differences in performance among the women.

Most says the results show something important and unexpected about the kind of emotion that occurs in a romantic relationship. “It doesn’t only affect our moods. It doesn’t only affect our physical health,” he says. “It actually influences what we even become aware of in the world.”

The researchers don’t yet know what will happen when the roles are reversed; in these experiments, it was always the women who searched for a target and were made to feel jealous. Future research might reveal whether men tend to be less or more blinded in similar circumstances.

Laurenceau, a member of the psychology department’s clinical science faculty, focuses his research on the psychology involved in close relationships.

“Being in close relationships is a primal human experience,” he says. “Developing and maintaining close, confiding and intimate relationships with significant others has dramatic effects on emotional and physical quality of life.”

Article by Andrea Boyle, AS ’02

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