ROMANTIC JEALOUSY AS A RISK FACTOR FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL ABUSE IN ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS

Romantic jealousy is an adaptive and complex emotional state widely diffused within romantic relationships. Research stated that jealousy feelings could constitute a significant risk factor for psychological abuse conducts in couples’ dynamics (Guerrero et al., 2004). However, to date, no studies have investigated the role played by different cognitive, emotional and behavioral aspects of jealousy feelings in predicting abusive conducts within couple relationships. The main focus of this paper is to fill this gap. 192 participants (38% males, from 19 to 30 years old, mean age = 21.84, SD = 2.47) were recruited for this study. Inclusion criterion was a romantic relation of at least six months. The range of the relationship length was from 6 to 99 months (mean =28.29, SD = 17.04). The Italian Short Form of the Multidimensional Jealousy Scale (Tani & Ponti, 2016) was used to investigate the three main dimensions of jealousy. The Italian Adaptation of the Multidimensional Measure of Emotional Abuse (Bonechi & Tani, 2011) was employed to assess the different aspects of psychological abuse. To evaluate the relationship between the three dimensions of romantic jealousy and couple abuse, two distinct multiple regression analyses were conducted, for suffered and acted abuse separately, inserting gender and relationship length as control variables. Findings showed that, independently of gender and length of relationship, the three dimensions of jealousy play a different role in predicting psychological abuse. In particular, both suffered and acted abuse appears to be significantly and positively predicted by cognitive and behavioral jealousy, while emotional jealousy doesn’t have any significant influence. Overall, our results are in line with the studies that see jealousy as a risk factor for abuse (Buss, 2000), highlighting the different role of the three dimensions of romantic jealousy.