Lauren Kieffer Christopher Antonio; Dreams PSYC 495 Word Count:422 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.
