How tall you are can determine how jealous you get. While an attractive, rich and strong rival will stir up feelings of jealousy, those feelings will be much stronger for shorter men and women, reports New Scientist.
That's the word from researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and the University of Valencia in Spain, who surveyed 549 Dutch and Spanish men and women to rate their feelings of jealousy, as well as list the qualities in a romantic competitor that were most likely to make them feel that way.
What they found is that the shorter the man, the more jealous he gets since male height is associated with attractiveness, dominance and reproductive success.
It even applied to women. While they were most alarmed by a competitor's beauty and charm, a woman's feelings of jealousy were less intense if she herself was of average height.
And that makes perfectly good sense--in evolutionary terms, according to lead study author Abraham Buunk. Why? Height is one of the first things others notice about us. The taller we are, the more social status we have. Also, men who are tall have the most success with women so they have the least need to be jealous, while women of medium height have the best health, fertility and popularity with men.
But even these women will experience greater feelings of jealousy if their rival is taller because such women tend to have more physical dominance and social status. "Taller women are more dominant and have greater fighting abilities than shorter women," says the study that was published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
"Jealousy is a type of fear," Simon Gelsthorpe, of the British Psychological Society, told the BBC News. "It is about being afraid you are going to lose someone you love."
--From the Editors at Netscape
