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They fail to spot things when distracted by the possibility that their boyfriend or husband finds another woman attractive, an experiment found.
Psychologists sat 25 young couples down next to each other at adjacent computer screens, with the men asked to rate how attractive pictures of landscapes were to them.
The women meanwhile, were asked to spot photographs of landscapes ? the "targets" ? amid rapid streams of images, which also included the occasional gruesome or graphic picture.
However, halfway through the experiment the women were told that their men were now rating images of women for attractiveness.
Later the women were asked how uneasy that made them feel.
Steven Most and Jean-Philippe Laurenceau, professors of psychology at the University of Delaware in the US, found that those women who admitted to being most jealous were the ones who most failed to spot the landscape images.
They concluded that they suffered from a form of "emotion-induced blindness".
Writing in the academic journal Emotion, they concluded: "The language of social relationships is filled with visual metaphor but the influence of social emotions?known to affect moods, behaviour and physical health?appears to permeate so deeply as to affect processes involved in visual awareness."
The experiment only looked at whether women were 'blinded by jealousy'. The researchers have yet to determine if men react in a similar fashion.