Nightmare Frequency and Femininity/Masculinity

Abstract

Several large-scale studies showed that women tend to report nightmares more often than men. Despite this robust finding, empirically tested interpretations of these sex differences are lacking. Levin and Nielsen put forward the hypothesis that sex-specific socialization might be one of the risk factors for nightmare occurrence. The present findings of an online survey indicate that expressivity/femininity and instrumentality/masculinity were related to nightmare frequency and, thus, supported this hypothesis. Since the sex difference in nightmare frequency was not fully explained by these two variables, future studies should investigate other variables — in addition to sex-role orientation — like depressive symptoms, history of sexual and/or physical abuse, ruminative coping styles, and physiological measures of processing emotional stimuli within the brain.