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Psychiatry & Psychology--General/Male vs. Female Brain Studies


Hi there! My name is Jade and I am currently a junior in high school. I am taking a science research class and would absolutely love to do a study on male vs. female brains. Ideally, I would like to take pre-existing data of males and females doing the same tasks monitored by MRI or PET scans and analyze it for my project. I have been desperately searching the web for datasets from multiple studies on this topic and I cannot find any for the life of me. Do you know of anywhere I could go to find data on studies like these? Thank you so much for your help!


Hi, Jade, I do not know of any data that exists on the web. Likely you would have to collaborate with a scholar who has already collected data. To do that, you would find an article that looks like it might have the kind of data you want, and then contact the author by email.

I would caution you though - likely you would have to learn, before you do any study, the format of the data you are looking for, and the statistics you are considering using. Both of these subjects likely involve a LOT of study and a LOT of knowledge about math and computers. If you don't have this kind of background, you would be unlikely to learn it before the end of your class.

It is much better, and more appropriate, for you to learn how to apply the scientific method to create an experiment and to understand what the results might mean. If you want to study brains, psychologists use behavior as a proxy for what the brain is doing. Thus, you could take an activity that most people think makes men and women different, select an activity that seems to be consistent with that, and then measure men and women. Then you would select multiple ways to measure that, and then use a statistical method to see what there is to see.

For example, you might ask the question - are women better at multitasking and men at single tasking?  

Psychiatry & Psychology--General

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Bruce Borkosky, Psy.D.


any related to psychology, especially related to forensic psychology



American Psychological Association


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