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A very popular area of study in Social Psychology is the gender differences in reference to sexual versus emotional infidelity. It has been frequently suggested by research that men are particularly upset with instances of their partner engaging in sexual infidelity. On the contrary, women tend to get more upset with instances of their partner committing emotional infidelity.

There have been several prospective explanations as to why this is the norm; one of which proposed in a research report composed by David M. Buss, Randy J. Larsen, Drew Westen and Jennifer Semmelroth in 1992 that states that the occurrence of these responses are innate differences that derive from the males’ need for paternity certainty and females’ need for male investment in their offspring. Another suggested reason proposed by Christine R. Harris and Nicholas Christenfeld is that these differences could very well be based on reasonable differences between men and women in the way that they interpret signs of infidelity.

Most men tend to think that women only have sex when they are in love; so if they think that their female partner is having sex with another man, they assume that she is also in love with him as well. Therefore, men are more threatened by sexual infidelity because it also means that their partner is guilty of emotional infidelity too. Men are concerned with the sexual infidelity of their partner because it causes paternity of any offspring to be clouded; thus making it a possibility that they will invest effort and resourced into genes that are not their own.

The majority of women assume that if their male partner is in love with another woman, that he is also in love with her. It is thought that men can have sex without feeling love, but not vice-versa. Women are therefore more threatened by emotional infidelity because it is a cue for sexual infidelity. They are more concerned with emotional infidelity because it could mean competition for resources for their offspring with the offspring of competing females.

In a typical study to gauge male and female responses to sexual versus emotional infidelity, men and women are asked to choose, between two, which scenario upsets them more: 1. their partner having sexual intercourse with another person, or 2. their partner falling in love with another person. This is considered to be a forced-answer method in which there will always be a significant gender difference in results; although, this does not mean that both scenarios are not upsetting to both men and women, they just had to choose which was more so. It is important to note that gender differences are not frequent in studies where participants were asked to use continuous rating scales to give an estimation of how upset each form of infidelity would make them.