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If you have to work on a particular Saturday afternoon, but your boyfriend is going off hiking, it would be churlish to hope he has a lousy time just because you can't join him. In the same way, someone who gets seriously jealous when their Significant Other makes eyes at another person could be accused of having an ugly spirit. Now a Canadian psychologist has found that sexually jealous people are likelier to be lopsided in body, as well.

Psychologist William M. Brown of Dalhousie University and colleague Chris Moore correlated a greater propensity to sexual jealousy with having a slightly more asymmetrical body. Their results were published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

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Brown started with the common-sense assumption that people would cling more tenaciously to something they desire that's hard to replace. Accordingly, he reasoned, people deemed less attractive would be more sexually jealous, since finding a new mate would be-- other things being equal-- more of a challenge.

Psychologists love to measure human attributes, such as intelligence, that defy clear quantification. Certainly beauty, existing as it does in beholders' eyes, is hard to get between calipers. But luckily ankles, fingers, and ears fit quite readily. Personals advertisers don't boast about their symmetry like they do about nine-inch dicks, but the degree to which a person's left and right sides match-up is an important ingredient in both individual and cultures' varied senses of what counts as beautiful. Not only is a gestalt sense of body symmetry readily-- and almost unconsciously-- grasped, it can also readily be measured.

Like good teeth and clear skin, symmetry correlates with health. As a body forms, it's buffeted by disruptions and "noise" of all kinds, potentially throwing development off-course. "Random errors in development can cause disturbances in cell division, differentiation, and growth, resulting in asymmetries in bilateral structures," says Brown. "'Developmental stability' refers to the capacity to withstand such developmental noise and attain the... 'design' that selection has favored."

Brown recruited 50 college students, and researchers used calipers to compare the size of-- among other structures-- left and right fingers, hands, wrists, and ears. They then added up the differences and ranked their subjects according to how lopsided they were overall.

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Researchers next turned to their subjects' minds-- giving them two standard psychological tests to test for jealousy. One test measured nonsexual jealousy-- asking respondents to report how jealous they would feel if work they had done themselves led to the promotion of a colleague. A similar test posed various scenarios of mates straying sexually and emotionally.

The more "lopsided" someone was, the more likely they were to report stronger sexual jealousy, but asymmetry did not correlate with reports of non-sexual jealousy. Despite other reports that women are more jealous than men, Brown didn't find any significant sex differences.

"These results are consistent with the idea that romantic jealousy is employed 'strategically' by those most vulnerable to infidelity-- namely those of relatively low mate value," claims Brown-- who estimates bodily asymmetry can account for some 20 percent of the differences people report in their degree of jealousies.

Alas, people can't do much about the symmetry of their bodies. But a jealous grimace can certainly screw up a person's face. If Professor Brown is onto something, the first step to being a more beautiful mate might be acknowledging that sexual exclusivity needn't be the basis of a solid relationship.