PH
Online cheating can produce reactions that differ from offline cheating.
Researchers presented heterosexual and homosexual participants with 10 jealousy-provoking scenarios involving online and offline partner behavior.
*** or falling in love with someone else mainly produced betrayal- and anger-related jealousy.
Emotional connections with another person produced more threat-related jealousy.
But researchers found another interesting gender difference.
Women experienced greater jealousy than men in scenarios involving potentially unfaithful online behavior, while this gender difference wasn't found for the offline scenarios.
Digital behavior can therefore feel like a serious relationship threat even before anything physical occurs.
© Scandinavian Journal of Psychology (2013)