We've all experienced it from time to time. That pang you feel when your significant other is looking at an attractive person. Or when they are sharing smiles with someone of the opposite sex. Yes, that feeling is the dreaded emotion called jealousy. Nobody wants to feel jealous (or be around other jealous people), and yet the emotion still rears its ugly head every once in a while. Jealousy in relationships is a pretty common occurrence, but the effects can be damaging, both to you and to your significant other.
This was recently proven in a study, published in the journal Emotion. Psychologists at the University of Delaware got 25 couples and sat each of them side by side in front of separate computers.
On the "his" screen they showed landscapes and asked the men to rate the beauty of what they were seeing. As this was happening, on the "her" screen, they showed a collage of images with occasional landscapes and asked the women to flag these.
After a bit the researchers told the women their men were looking not at landscapes but females, and worse they were rating their attractiveness.
Meanwhile, on the "her" screen, the image stream continued and the women participants were still expected to identify the landscape shots when they appeared.
