Confirmed: Jealousy really is blinding

Jealous women were found to be more distracted. The more jealous they reported feeling, the more distracted they were by the emotional images and therefore they were less able to pick out the targets they were being tested on.

But this emotional distraction only blinded participants when their male partner was rating the attractiveness of single women and not when looking at landscapes.

“This helps to rule out baseline individual differences between the women and helps us attribute the effect specifically to the jealousy manipulation,” said study researcher Steven Most of the Department of Psychology at the University of Delaware.