Morbid jealousy is a potentially disruptive condition that has received
little attention. A cognitive-behavioural formulation of morbid jealousy
proposes that such individuals possess schema in which there is a perceived
threat of loss of their sexual partner. An attentional bias in morbid
jealousy was investigated by using a dichotic listening task and the
modified Stroop test. Twenty subjects who had met criterion for morbid
jealousy were compared with 20 control subjects. In the dichotic listening
task, word pairs were presented to each ear simultaneously, and subjects
shadowed one channel while identifying target words. Ten percent of the
words presented to the non-attended channel were target words, of which
half were jealousy-related and half were not. Subjects were not told that
the target words were only presented in the unattended channel. In the
modified Stroop test, subjects had to name the colour of a series of Os,
colour words, emotional words, control neutral words and jealousy-related
words. As predicted, jealous subjects showed a superior performance in
detecting jealousy-related stimuli in the dichotic listening task and an
impaired performance in the colour naming of jealousy-related stimuli in
the modified Stroop test, compared to the control subjects and the control
conditions. The results of this study add support to the formulation that
morbid jealousy involves an attentional bias towards jealousy-related
information and this may have clinical implications.