Gender Differences in Romantic Jealousy

Abstract

Findings of studies of gender differences in jealousy are contradictory. In the present study, conflicting literature was addressed by distinguishing 5 dimensions of jealousy: level, trigger, experience, focus, and responses. In 4 studies, 3 in the U.S. and 1 in Israel, gender differences were explored in these 5 dimensions of romantic jealousy. Although there were no gender differences in the likelihood, frequency, duration, or intensity of jealousy, there were differences in the responses to certain jealousy-producing occasions as well as in the focus, experience, and expression of jealousy.     

Aligning Mars and Venus: The Social Construction and Instability of Gender Differences in Romantic Relationships

An evolutionary approach to gender differences in romantic relationships has pervaded the scientific literature, a trend mirrored in popular culture by Mars-Venus stereotyping. Three studies tested the accuracy of the popular notion that gender differences would emerge for the behaviors women and men want and receive from romantic partners in a sample of 375 students at a southeastern U.S. public university. Across the three studies, only one stable and robust gender difference emerged (desires regarding relationship support), as did several unstable gender differences. However, gender-role identity significantly accounted for nearly half of the variance in this one stable gender difference, challenging the viability of some evolutionary conceptualizations of gender differences and instead providing support for social constructionist and feminist perspectives.     

Gender Differences and Similarities in Strategies for Managing Conflict with Friends and Romantic Partners

Using hypothetical vignettes, we investigated the extent to which gender differences in conflict-management strategies depended on the relationship context of a same-gender friendship vs. a romantic relationship. Associations between conflict-management strategies, goals and gender-typed traits also were assessed. Men (131) and women (203) undergraduate students (19–25?years) from a state university in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States participated. To assess expressive and instrumental personality traits, participants completed the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ; Spence and Helmreich 1978). Participants also rated their endorsement of communal and agentic goals and strategies for managing hypothetical conflicts presented in the “Peer Conflict Management Questionnaire.” This questionnaire, created for the purposes of this study, consisted of 4 vignettes that portrayed hypothetical conflicts with a friend and a romantic partner. Results showed that women were more likely than men to endorse communal strategies when managing conflict with a same-gender friend, but not with a romantic partner. Women were more likely than men to endorse agentic strategies for managing conflict with a romantic partner, but not with a same-gender friend. For conflicts with a same-gender friend, communal goals, but not expressive traits or gender, predicted communal strategy endorsement. For conflicts with a romantic partner, gender and agentic goals predicted agentic strategies; instrumental traits did not. Implications for understanding consequences of gender-typed relationship processes are discussed. The contextual specificity of gender differences and similarities are emphasized.     

Liking Violence and Action: An Examination of Gender Differences in Children's Processing of Animated Content

It is widely assumed that children like violence in cartoons, but this assumption has not been supported in existing studies that show nonviolent programs are liked just as much or more than violent programs. The present experiment extended enjoyment of media violence research by testing whether violence and action (independently manipulated) influenced children's liking of slapstick cartoons. We also proposed a path model to test potential indirect effects of violence and action on liking. Using animation software, four versions of a slapstick cartoon were created that varied in terms of violence (present, absent) and action (high, low). A total of 128 elementary school children watched one of the four versions of the program. Violence had no direct effect on the liking of the cartoon, but did indirectly decrease liking for males by decreasing boys' wishful identification with the anthropomorphized characters. Action increased liking for males but not for females.     

Romantic Conflict Narratives in Emerging Adult Couples: Viewpoint and Gender Matter

Healthy romantic relationships entail understanding the needs of the self and other when interpreting conflict events. Yet how couples make meaning around specific conflicts and their capacity to reflect on their own and their partners’ unmet needs is understudied. Using narratives, we examined destructive (e.g., extreme anger and break-up anxiety) and constructive (e.g., perspective taking) interpretations of past romantic conflicts in 80 emerging adult heterosexual couples and the extent to which such interpretations varied by viewpoint and gender. Couple members were interviewed separately about two conflict episodes in which their partner did not meet their needs (victim viewpoint) and two episodes in which they did not meet their partners’ needs (perpetrator viewpoint). As anticipated, destructive interpretations were more evident in the victim viewpoint and for female couple members. In contrast, within constructive interpretations, the use of insight was greater in the perpetrator than the victim viewpoint. Although perspective taking was expected to be more common in the perpetrator viewpoint and in female narratives, this was not the case, as this type of constructive interpretation was infrequent in narratives about conflict. The findings revealed aspects of meaning making that might be useful to mental health professionals concerned with building skills to improve romantic competence in emerging adult couples.     

Workaholism in Organizations: Gender Differences

Although the concept of workaholism inorganizations has received considerable attention, ourunderstanding of it based on research evidence islimited. This results from the absence of both suitabledefinitions and measures of the concept. This study, usingmeasures developed by Spence and Robbins (1992),examines gender differences in a predominantly whitemanagerial sample-in three workaholism components and workaholic job behaviors among managers andprofessionals. Although females and males were found todiffer on many personal and situational demographiccharacters, they were similar on the three workaholism components: work involvement, feeling driven towork, and work enjoyment. Females reported higher levelsof particular workaholic job behaviors (e.g.,perfectionism, job stress) likely to be associated with lower levels of satisfaction andwell-being.     

Gender Differences in Family Stories: Moderating Influence of Parent Gender Role and Child Gender

One hundred and twenty families and their 4-year-old children participated in a study on family stories. The participants were primarily White (91%), with the remainder Black (4%), Hispanic (2%), and Asian (2%). The parents were primarily middle class and upper class, with approximately 5% identifying themselves as from a lower socioeconomic background. Parents were asked to tell their son or daughter stories about when the parent was growing up. All parents completed measures of child behavior and a subset of parents completed the Bem Sex Role inventory. Stories were coded for the strength of affiliation, achievement, and autonomy themes. No gender differences were found for parents or child in the strength of affiliation themes. Fathers told stories with stronger autonomy themes than did mothers, and sons were more likely to hear stories with themes of autonomy than were daughters. An interaction was found between gender type of parent and gender of child for strength of achievement theme. Traditional gender-typed parents told stories with stronger achievement themes to their sons, and nontraditional gender-typed parents told stories with stronger achievement themes to their daughters. Exploratory analyses were conducted examining the relations among story theme, parent gender type, and child behavior. Higher levels of externalizing behaviors were found in boys whose fathers endorsed strong masculine attitudes, but told stories with weak achievement themes. Higher levels of internalizing behaviors were found in girls whose mothers told stories with strong affiliation themes, but endorsed weak feminine attitudes. Family stories are proposed to be one aspect of socialization that includes an interaction between child and parent characteristics.     

The Proof is in the Punch: Gender Differences in Perceptions of Action and Aggression as Components of Manhood

Two studies test the hypotheses that men, relative to women: 1) see manhood as a more elusive, impermanent state than womanhood, and 2) understand aggression as a means of proving or re-establishing threatened manhood, but not threatened womanhood. In Study 1 (N?=?175 Northeastern U.S. undergraduates), men’s (but not women’s) sentence completions revealed tendencies to define manhood by actions and womanhood by enduring traits. In Study 2 (N?=?113 Southeastern U.S. undergraduates), men were more likely than women to explain a man’s physical aggression in primarily situational terms, whereas men and women did not differ in the attributions they made for a woman’s physical aggression. Results suggest that men perceive active and aggressive behaviors as integral parts of manhood and its defense.     

Typical Dreams: Stability and Gender Differences

Although the variability of dream content is large, typical dream themes that occur quite often and are reported by many people can be identified (e.g., being chased, falling, flying, failing an examination, being unable to find a toilet or restroom). The present study is an investigation of the stability of the rank order of the dream themes and of gender differences in the content of dreams. The authors administered A. L. Zadra and T. A. Nielsen's (1997) Typical Dream Questionnaire to 444 participants. The findings indicated that most of the 55 dream themes occurred at least once in most of the participants' lifetimes. In addition, the correlation coefficients for the rank order of the themes were very high; that is, the relative frequencies were stable. The gender differences in the present study were in line with content analytic findings; for example, men reported dreams about physical aggression more often than did women. Overall, previous research and the present data indicate that available research results of the measurement of typical dream themes are reliable and valid. The question of the meaning of these themes or the relationship between typical dream contents and waking life experiences, however, has not yet been answered and is open to future research.     

情侣依恋与情感投入：性别的调节作用

考察情侣依恋、情感投入和性别之间的关系。结果发现,承诺和满意度与焦虑依恋和逃避依恋相关显著,对两种依恋预测作用显著。性别调节作用仅存在于承诺和满意度与焦虑依恋的关系中:男生的承诺与焦虑依恋关系较强;女生的满意度与焦虑依恋关系较强。承诺和满意度与逃避依恋的关系没有性别差异。焦虑依恋和逃避依恋相对独立。性别对承诺和满意度与焦虑依恋和逃避依恋的关系中有不同调节作用。     

Gender Differences in Virtual Negotiation: Theory and Research

Social roles create conflicting behavioral expectations for female negotiators; however, virtual negotiations reduce social pressures. This paper reviews theoretical explanations on why men and women might differ in negotiations that occur through email, telephone, or video. Forty-three negotiation studies comparing face-to-face and virtual negotiations were examined for gender differences. All studies were reported in English but not limited to US participants. While many reports omitted gender information, meta-analytic findings supported the prediction that women would be more hostile in virtual compared to face-to-face negotiations, as well as finding no hostility difference for men between virtual and face-to-face negotiations. While negotiators overall were more successful face-to-face than virtually, results separated by gender did not find this effect.     

Gender and Conjugal Differences in Happiness

Abstract

The author examined conjugal congruence on 4 role experiences–spousal, parental, filial, worker–and on subjective well-being (SWB). According to purposive sampling strategy, 222 community adults (111 married couples) in Taiwan completed a research questionnaire. Conjugal congruence on role experiences was linked to conjugal congruence on SWB as well as personal well-being. Analyses showed that conjugal congruence on role experiences (except the worker role) and SWB was generally high. However, some conjugal discrepancies persisted: The husbands were more committed to the worker role, whereas the wives were more committed to the parental role. Furthermore, conjugal discrepancies in role experiences were related to conjugal discrepancies in SWB as well as to husbands' happiness.     

Gender Differences in Gossip and Friendship

Gossip has been related to friendship as it can increase the bond between people and sense of belonging to a group. However, the role of gender in the relationship between gossip and friendship has not been examined in the literature. So, the present study examined gender differences in the relationship between friendship quality and gossip tendency with a sample of 167 female and 69 male Western Canadian undergraduate University students using the Friendship questionnaire and the Tendency to Gossip questionnaire. Given gender differences in friendship, with males being more agentic and females more communal, the relationship between gossip and friendship was predicted to be stronger in the males compared to the females. Friendship quality was positively correlated with gossip tendency in the males, but this effect was not present with the females. The information gossip scale was strongly associated with male friendship quality. This finding may be related to the greater emphasis on status with males, and that possession of knowledge and control of information is a method of attaining status. Physical appearance gossip was found to be more prevalent in females, but not related to friendship quality. This type of gossip may be a more of a competitive threat to the relationship in females. Achievement related gossip was also related to male friendship quality, which reflects the greater emphasis on individuation in male friendships.     

人类大脑结构和功能的性别差异：来自脑成像研究的证据

大脑的性别差异近年来受到了广泛关注。脑成像技术的出现为脑结构和脑功能性别差异的研究开辟了新的道路。借助结构磁共振成像和弥散张量成像等脑结构信息, 以及脑电图、正电子发射断层扫描技术和功能性磁共振成像等脑功能信息, 当前研究主要探讨了脑灰质、脑白质和大脑的基线活动在脑局部区域、脑子系统、全脑连接组三个层次上的性别差异及其在年龄上的发展变化。此外, 为了更好地理解脑性别差异, 当前文章还探讨了脑性别差异研究领域的一些认识误区。有关脑性别差异的研究虽然已经取得了丰富的成果, 但现有的研究结果存在很多分歧, 仍然有深入挖掘的空间。未来应该加强对具有性别特异性的心理疾病脑机制的研究, 关注基因和环境对脑性别差异的交互作用, 并利用脑功能活动动态变化的特性、以及结合多模态的脑成像技术进一步阐明脑性别差异。     

Gender Role Differences in College Students from One- and Two-Parent Families

This study explores three aspects of gender roles: the person's perceptions of their own gender role, the person's perceptions of socially idealized gender roles, and the fit between an individual's gender role and their perception of the ideal person's gender role. Because parent–child relationships and gender models and attitudes in one- and two-parent families may differ, the gender roles of college students raised in one- versus two-parent families may differ. Participants in one- and two-parent families were paired based on gender, age, race, and family of origin's current income. Forty-five pairs resulted (30 Caucasian, 12 African-American, and 3 Asian-American pairs). Twenty-one of the pairs were lower middle class, 11 were middle class, and 13 were upper middle class. Differences in gender roles were found. Males and females raised in mother-headed one-parent families were more likely than males and females raised in intact two-parent families to view their own gender role in terms of traditionally masculine characteristics (independence, assertiveness, self-reliance, self-sufficiency, etc.) and to report a low level of traditionally feminine characteristics. In contrast, females in intact two-parent families were more likely than females in mother-headed one-parent families to view themselves as androgenous. No differences in idealized gender roles were found between students raised in one- versus two-parent families; students from both types of families perceived the ideal person as androgenous.     

Overgeneral Autobiographical Memories: Gender Differences in Depression

Considering the higher prevalence of depression in women than in men, the study of the variables that underlie this gender difference becomes important for both the prevention and the treatment of depression. This study explores gender differences in the relationship between depressive symptoms, rumination, repressive coping, and overgeneral autobiographical memory (OGM) in a nonclinical population. There are 141 men and 148 women who completed the measures of depression, rumination, and repression, and the Autobiographical Memory Test to assess OGM. Women remembered a higher number of specific memories than men. Most importantly, results showed a different pattern of association between rumination, repression, depression, and OGM by gender. Depressive symptoms were associated with repressive coping and OGM in women. However, depressive symptomatology was related to repressive coping but not to OGM in men. These results suggest that the role of OGM in depression may be less important in men than in women. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ethnic and Gender Differences in Applicants' Decision‐Making Processes: An Application of the Theory of Reasoned Action

Although a growing proportion of the new entrants into the workforce consist of women and ethnic minorities, relatively little is known about the recruitment and job choice processes of these applicant groups. Therefore, this study investigated cultural and gender differences in job application decision processes among 191 job seekers looking for temporary employment. The theory of reasoned action (TRA) was found to be a valid framework to explain job application decisions, although gender differences existed in the strength of the relations. Job attractiveness and perceived person–organization fit added to the prediction of job application intention over and beyond the TRA variables.     

Gender,Gender Roles,and Personality: Gender Differences in the Prediction of Coping and Psychological Symptoms

Path models of the effects of gender, gender roles, and personality variables (achievement and affiliation orientation, locus of control, empathy) on coping and symptoms were tested to explore the risk and protective effects of gender roles and personality on psychological symptoms, and to test whether or not gender roles or personality accounted for gender differences in coping and symptoms. In a sample of university undergraduates (35% Asian American, 59% European American or Caucasian, 6% other ethnic/racial background), masculinity predicted lower depression but higher antisocial and substance use problems, whereas femininity predicted lower antisocial and substance use problems. Personality variables did not account for the effects of gender or gender roles on coping or symptoms, but rather gender roles and personality each predicted unique variance in those variables. Significant gender differences in the relations among gender roles and personality emerged; however, there were no gender differences in the relations between coping and symptoms. Findings highlight the importance of studying gender differences in the effects of gender roles and personality on coping and symptoms, because it appears that gender roles and personality operate differently for males and females.     

Gender Differences in Attitudes Toward Affirmative Action Programs in Australia: Effects of Beliefs,Interests, and Attitudes Toward Women

This research identified mediators explaining the relationship between gender and attitudes toward affirmative action programs for women. Structural equation modeling was conducted on survey data obtained from academics at an Australian university (n = 198 with listwise deletion of missing data). Findings indicated that the relationship between gender and affirmative action attitudes was mediated by (1) perceptions of affirmative action's impact on material self-interest, (2) belief in the existence of gender discrimination, and (3) traditional attitudes toward women. Implications for organizations, policymakers, and researchers are discussed.