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Emotional Distress Towards Intersexual Deception
David Buss' research also explores the differing ways in which men and women cope with intersexual deception. His Strategic Interference Theory (SIT) states that conflict occurs when the strategies enacted by one person interfere with the strategies, goals, and desires of another individual. Buss found that anger and distress are the two primary emotions that have evolved as solutions to strategic interference between men and women. When a person’s goals, desires, and strategies are compromised, his or her aroused anger and subjective distress serve four functions: (1) to draw attention to the interfering events, (2) to mark those events for storage in long-term memory, (3) to motivate actions that reduce or eliminate the source of strategic interference, and (4) to motivate memorial retrieval and, hence, subsequent avoidance of situations producing further interference. In this manner, SIT implies that anger and distress will be activated when a person is confronted with an event that interferes with his or her favored sexual strategy. The source of interference will differ between the sexes, as men and women display different sexual strategies.

Buss and colleagues have found that SIT helps in predicting emotional arousal with respect to mating deception. These predictions can be made in regards to various scenarios that often occur between men and women. The research facilitated by Buss and colleagues show that women, in comparison to men, will display more emotional distress when they have been deceived about their partner's socioeconomic status, when their partners deploy expressions of love as a short-term mating strategy, when their partners display postcopulatory signals of disinterest in pursuing a long-term relationship, and when their partners conceal their existing emotional investment in another person. Men, more than women, will become emotionally distressed when their partners present false invitations for sex as a long-term mating strategy, when their partner displays sexual infidelity in the context of a long-term relationship, and when their partners lie about the content of their sexual fantasies.