Naive theories about the emotional experience of jealousy in Swiss French-speaking subjects.

Naive theories about the emotional experience elicited by 2 typical jealousy antecedents - i.e., a person sees his/her partner kiss (Kiss) or flirt with someone (Flirt) - were studied by analyzing Swiss French-speaking men's and women's (N= 111; 24 yrs-old) answers to a questionnaire (e.g., Zammuner, in press) that described in a vignette format one of the two events. Judgements were attributions to same-sex event protagonists and pertained to various aspects of the emotional experience, such as its components (e.g., behaviors), its perceived “adequacy”, degree of conflictuality over the felt emotions, and extent of social sharing. SYNTHESIS OF MAIN RESULTS Qualitative and quantitative analyses (e.g., correspondence analysis; analyses of variance) of Ss' answers to 6 closed and 11 open questions showed that Ss have complex lay theories of emotions that embody culturally relevant prescriptions. In particular, Ss believe that: (a) the events elicit intense emotional experiences (M = 7.5, on a 1-10 scale) (b) on the average experiences last more than just a few moments, and typically up to half an hour or more; (c) experiences are multicomponential, comprising one or more emotions (e.g. jealousy, anger, sadness), behaviors, cognitions, and, least often, physiological and expressive reactions; (d) the emotional experience is due to such causes as one's involvement in the relationship, the unexpectedness of the event, and its implications for the future; (e) the experience often gives rise to both conflict and uncertainty, due to such causes as a reason-emotion opposition, or to feeling opposite emotions, or ambiguous ones. (f) In comparison to ‘immediate’ reactions, 'adequate' reactions to the event are, as expected, characterized by greater 'rationality', by regulatory attempts (e.g., attempting to control emotions; listening to the partner's explanations before deciding how to judge the 'betrayal'); (g) most felt emotions were not 'sincerely' communicated: they are intensified, or attenuated. (h) On the average, women expressed 'richer' theories than men did (M= 11.7 concepts, versus 9.7). (i) The Event type had a 'differential' effect on both the richness and the contents of lay theories (Kiss = 11.4 concepts, Flirt = 10.1). Overall the Event explained a greater amount of variance in subjects' open and closed answers than Sex did (e.g., the Event explained 74% of the content of open answers, versus 26% explained by the sex variable). In sum, Swiss adults have theories overall similar to the Italians’ ones, although a few interesting differences were observed.