Jealousy May Really Impair Vision

In an interesting series of new experiments, scientists from the University of Delaware, in the United States, looked at how jealousy affect men and women's ability to literally see things. In order to do this, they devised a cunning setup in their laboratory, which revealed that this feeling could literally blind people to images that they would otherwise certainly notice. Details of the discovery appear in the April issue of the respected scientific journal Emotion, LiveScience reports.

In the study, men and women in romantic couples were separated from each other via a curtain, and made to watch a computer screen. The researchers showed various images, and asked the participants to rate their attractiveness. In the image series, they also introduced gruesome photos, or images that were graphic to some extent. Halfway through the investigation, the women were told that their men had been asked to rate the attractiveness of other females on their computer screens. The scientists than rated how the women reacted.

The females that proved to be most jealous experienced the highest levels of distraction, the investigators learned. After hearing the announcement, they became a lot less likely than women who were not jealous to fail to observe the graphic or gruesome images that flashed on their computer screens. The impairment occurred only when the test subjects thought that their partners were rating the attractiveness of other women, and not when researchers told them that their men were looking at various landscapes.

“This helps to rule out baseline individual differences between the women and helps us attribute the effect specifically to the jealousy manipulation. When an emotional stimulus appears, it draws attention to itself – and thus draws attention away from other things that come immediately afterwards. When attention is preoccupied in such a way, we tend to miss thing that appear right in front of our eyes,” explains UD Department of Psychology expert and study researchers Steven Most.

“What seems to be occurring is that the women were being distracted by images that were consistent with their negative emotional state. The jealousy manipulation likely raised their temporary level of anxiety, and it turns out that anxious people tend to be more prone to attend to negative emotional stimuli than non-anxious people,” he concludes.