Jealousy Alert! - Does Being Attractive Always Help? (Part 3)

Another situation in which very attractive people have to be careful is when they meet same-sex people high in chronic jealousy. This is at least the result of the study by Maina and colleagues published in 2009 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and called intrasexual vigilance the implicit cognition of romantic rivalry. Maina and colleagues conducted four experiments with a total of 576 participants to observe whether people high in chronic jealousy are more vigilant towards potential rivals and if they have implicit negative attitudes towards them. Therefore they first had to make them feel jealous and to do so they had them primed. Priming is one of the most interesting methods in psychology. What you do is to secretly pre-activate neural pathways in the brain to evoke for example the feeling of jealousy and you do so by telling the subjects well we are interested in the link between memory and cognitive performance. So what we want from you is first of all to recall four or five episodes in which you felt jealous and you feared choose the most salient one and describe it in more detail. Afterwards you tell them okay now we measure your cognitive performance with a test of attention. The participants think well it's all been about memory retrieval. They don't know that it's been the emotion of jealousy that you were interested in. So they take this attention test and what you find now is very interesting. The concept and the feeling of jealousy probably was still activated during this attention task because during this task in which they were also asked to switch their attention away from pictures of faces. During this test participants that were high in chronic jealousy couldn't take their eyes off the more attractive same sex targets. So there indeed seemed to be some intra-sexual vigilance. In the second experiment subjects were told okay you will participate in two independent experiments. I mean it would be a waste of time for you and us if we had to ask you to come to the university for two times. So this is just more efficient. The first is a visualization experiment. Just imagine you are at a party and you see your girlfriend or your boyfriend flirting with another guy or girl and he or she is even being intimate with another person at this party. So this was a priming procedure. To have a similar amount of arousal in the control group the control group was told okay please imagine you and a group of people took an exam and all of you failed. This was a really important exam. How do you feel? Afterwards both groups had to work on a memory task which was similar to the game memory. In Germany we call it memory. I don't know if it's the same all over the world. You have to find pairs of pictures and if they don't match you have to turn them around again till you find the right matches. People high in chronic jealousy after being primed showed better, significantly better memory for very attractive same-sex targets. So okay if you're a top model and you're good-looking and you meet somebody who is high in chronic jealousy well he will remember you better. So what? Isn't it good if someone keeps you in mind? Maybe it's good for your job. Well the results of experiment three and four speak against it because they don't only remember you they also seem to have negative feelings against you. In both experiments the priming procedure was the same as in experiment two and well for time reasons let's just take a look at experiment three. To measure the implicit attitude they showed participants Chinese letters and right before every letter a picture of an either good-looking or less good-looking same-sex or other sex target was shown and they told the participants all you have to do is to tell us how pleasant do you find the Chinese signs. The portraits that are shown before the signs are irrelevant they are part of another experiment but you are in the group that has just to rate the Chinese signs and in this way as it's been shown in other studies it is possible to examine the implicit attitudes of people because the Chinese letters changed randomly and what they really rate is not the letter but in fact it's the picture they see before the letter and they are not aware of it but in fact this is an indicator for their real implicit attitudes and it turned out that individuals high in chronic jealousy significantly devaluated Chinese letters which were shown right after pictures of really attractive other sex targets so if you are a top model beware of same-sex people that are high in chronic jealousy that's been the last episode on the halo effect hope you enjoyed it see you next