Influence of Gender and Age in Aggressive Dream Content of Spanish Children and Adolescents

This study investigated the aggressive components of the dream content of 120 Spanish children and adolescents of 4 different age groups. The C. S. Hall and R. L. Van de Castle (1966) coding system was used to rate the number of dream characters and aggressions, and the content findings were analyzed via the indicators presented by G. W. Domhoff (1993, 1996, 2003). Results confirm the findings of previous studies of gender and age differences in dream content: Boys tend to have more aggressive dream content, which tends to decrease with age until reaching a pattern similar to the normative group; younger children, especially boys, tend to be victims of aggression more frequently than do older children. In addition, a data analysis procedure involving cumulative scoring of the aggression scale as well as nonparametric statistics yielded significant differences between boys and girls of the youngest group for severity of aggression.