What Kind of Text Message Makes You Jealous?

Martin Graff Ph.D. Love, Digitally

What Kind of Text Message Makes You Jealous?

Do you check your partner’s phone?

Posted May 17, 2016

Source: Antonio Guillern/Shutterstock

Do you look at the text message on your partner’s phone? Do you wonder if you should you even look at your partner’s messages—and is your partner OK with you looking at their texts? A 2012 study carried out by Derby, Knox and Easterling found that about two thirds of participants admitted to surreptitiously looking through their partner’s private messages, including social networking sites and texts on their phone. In other words, these people had checked their partner’s phones or social networking sites without their partner’s consent.
The risk that comes with checking your partner’s private correspondence is that you may find material (however ambiguous) that causes you to feel jealous. This can come in the form of thoughts, emotions, or behavior. No matter how we experience jealousy, it has a function, which is protecting or defending our relationships from people who may be attempting to steal our partner.
So what types of information found on a partner’s phone causes us to experience jealousy? Evolutionary psychology proposes that men and women experience jealousy in different ways, and are motivated by different threats to a relationship. Men typically become more jealous of sexual infidelity because this poses a risk to the paternity of their offspring. Women become more jealous of emotional infidelity because this may pose a risk to the long-term commitment of their partner who provides them with resources such as food or protection. This gender difference in jealousy response was demonstrated in a classic study by Buss, Larsen and Western (1992) where male and female participants read scenarios involving emotional and sexual infidelity, and were asked to respond in terms of how jealous each scenario made them feel. The researchers found that men were more likely to report jealousy in response to the sexual scenario, and women were more likely to report jealousy in response to the emotional scenario.
How does this relate to mobile phones?
Given that so many people admit to checking their partner’s phone, is it the case that men and women respond differently to different types of messages (those containing predominantly emotional content versus those containing sexual content)? A clever study by Dunn and Mclean (2015) investigated this concept by presenting participants with four imagined text messages that contained either sexual or emotional content. At the same time, the number and the duration of participants’ fixations to each text message were recorded with an eye tracking machine. The researchers hypothesized that when people pay attention to salient stimuli, and because men and women become jealous as a result of different types of infidelity, they pay different amounts of attention to messages containing either sexual or emotional content.
The study employed a sample of 42 undergraduate students. The eye tracker used by the researchers recorded the following:

• the total number of fixations on each message
• the overall time spent looking at each message

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The researchers also asked participants to indicate which message they would find most distressing if they were to discover it on their partner’s phone, although this was not an essential part of the study.
The study found that the total number of fixations was greater for women than for men who viewed the emotional message; women also spent longer looking at the emotional message than did men. For the sexual message, the opposite pattern was observed: Men fixated more on this message than women, and also spent more time looking at this message than women.
Why check your partner’s phone?
Why do people feel the need to check, or even have access to their partner’s phones? The bad news is that in 2013, a survey conducted by a mobile phone insurance website of almost 2,400 respondents in the United Kingdom who had discovered the infidelity of their partner, or who had been unfaithful themselves, reported that in 41 percent of cases the unfaithful behavior had come to light through evidence revealed on a mobile phone. The second most likely way (23 percent) in which infidelity was discovered was via a social networking site (Waterlow, 2013). This research was prompted by the rise in the number of claims relating to damaged phone handsets. Almost 10 percent of those questioned said that their phone had become broken after being dropped or thrown following an argument.
These studies reveal that many people now almost routinely check their partner’s phone. Sometimes this is with good reason: People don’t want to waste time being with a cheat.
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References

• Buss, D. M., Larsen, R.J., Western, D., &  Semmelroth, J. (1992) Sex differences in jealousy: Evolution, physiology and psychology. Psychological Science, 3, 251–255.
• Derby, K., Knox, D., & Easterling, B. (2012). Snooping in romantic relationships. College Student Journal, 46, 333–343.
• Dunn, M. J. & McLean, H. (2015). Jealousy-Induced Sex Differences in Eye Gaze Directed at Either Emotional-or Sexual Infidelity-Related Mobile Phone Messages. Cyberpsychology, Behaviour and Social Networking, 18, (1), 37-40.
• Waterlow, L. (2013). Dial I for infidelity: Checking partner’s mobile phone is most common way affairs are exposed. www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2268169/Dial-I-infidelityChecking-par... (accessed May 17, 2016).