Lauren Kieffer

Christopher Antonio; Dreams Word Count:422

PSYC 495

This study is a meta-analysis studying the gender differences in the aggression of

dreams. Aggression is defined as actions or behaviors meant to harm other people. Within

dream aggression is very similar but it is the feelings or acts of a character in a dream intending

to hurt another character. Dreams have two main categories of aggression, physical and

nonphysical and contain 8 subcategories. Aggression was shown to be the most common

interaction in dreams. Aggression in dreams is a highly researched area because it is affected

by age, gender, and race. This meta analysis was created to further explore the patterns

between dream aggression, gender and how it pertains to reality.

The articles collected had to have data for both men and women available with a 95%

confidence interval, the MRD method was used to collect dreams, and the participants were

healthy without mental disorders. If women's dreams involved more aggression the odds ratio

would be less than 1 and if males dreams involved more aggression it would be more than 1. If

there was no gender difference the odds ratio would not be different from 1.

A total of 12 studies were included in the final meta analysis. In these studies they

divided participants into groups of children, teenagers and adults. The participant pool

consisted of 3,294 individuals, 1,522 males and 1,772 females with an age range of 7-70 years

old.The pooled ES shows that the odds ratio was 1.346 meaning there was more aggression in

the dreams of males than females in the child, teenager and adult group. However, they found

that the gender difference in the aggressive behaviors was significant in the children and adults

dreams but not in teenagers. Most of these studies found that men dream of killing someone

more than women. Men's dreams also had a higher ratio of male to female characters than

female dreams. It also showed that men’s dreams have a higher number of male characters

leading to the conclusion that they like to compete with the same sex. The results also support
the hypothesis that characteristics of dreams are related to real life experiences. It was also

found that boys aged 7-11 showed the highest physical aggression in dreams. This study can

help further research to study the gender differences in dream and waking experiences.