Washington: The age-old saying that men are from Mars and women are from Venus may not stand true when it comes to jealousy.

For long, psychologists have contended that men tend to care more about sexual infidelity while women usually react more strongly to emotional infidelity.

However, a recent research by a psychologist Christine Harris at the Centre for Brain and Cognition at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), casts serious doubts on this view of gender differences on jealousy and argues that more men and women appear to view sexual and emotional jealousy in the same light, according to a report in the website of UCSD.

"This research has found that the evolutionary theory of jealousy just does not hold up to rigorous academic scrutiny. A thorough analysis of the different lines of research, which espoused this point of view raise serious doubts about how much of a sex difference actually exists. It is entirely possible that natural selection shaped the two sexes to be more similar rather than different," Harris said.

The evolutionary theory of jealousy purports that sex differences in jealousy arose because natural selection shaped sexual jealousy as a mechanism to prevent cuckoldry and emotional jealousy as a mechanism to prevent the loss of resources.

Harris also questions studies by evolutionary psychologists claiming that men are far more likely to kill their spouses in a rage of sexual jealousy. Many of these studies, she argues, fail to take into consideration that men are far more likely to be the perpetrators of all types of violent crime.

When the proportion of homicides involving jealousy is taken into account, women are just as likely to kill their spouses in a fit of sexual jealousy as men.

ANI