A poster of the film No Entry in which Lara Dutta plays a suspicious wife

New Delhi, Feb. 4: Arranged marriages may spawn suspicious spouses. A research study has suggested that in cultures where parents heavily influence the choice of mate, levels of unwarranted protective behaviour towards spouses are higher.

The study by two social psychologists in The Netherlands suggests that individuals feel a need to guard spouses more they have been assigned to them through parental influences rather than when they have chosen to marry them through free choice.

“Freedom of mate choice seems to make mate guarding less necessary,” the researchers Abraham Buunk and Alejandro Castro Solano at the University of Groningen said in their study to appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal Personal Relationships.

The study, based on perceptions of male and female students from Asian, European and African countries studying at Groningen, also found that there were no sex differences in mate guarding behaviour — men and women engage in similar levels of mate guarding.

Mate guarding practices vary across cultures — ranging from veils to walled courtyards to jealously or suspicions when a spouse interacts with the opposite sex. The study has found that mate guarding was likely to be higher among Indian, Chinese, Moroccan and Turkish respondents than among study participants from European cultures. Parental control on choice of mate led to higher levels of mate guarding.

The findings show a link between freedom of mate choice and mate guarding, and “illuminate a potentially powerful determinant of mate guarding that thus far has not received due attention”, the scientists wrote in their research paper.

“If a marriage is not based on choice or love, a person is more likely to become jealous over seemingly inconsequential (contacts),” said Buunk, professor of social psychology at the University of Groningen. “This is probably because it is harder to be sure that the person is in love with you out of their own volition,” Buunk said in a statement about the research issued through the journal’s publishers.

Mate guarding has been observed in several other species — from swallows to baboons to chimpanzees, among others — where it is typically seen in the form of surveillance of the mate. Evolutionary biologists believe mate guarding evolved as it helps guarantee paternity.