Gina Rippon

Who they are

Her published author profile describes her as an emeritus professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre at Aston University and an international expert on brain-imaging techniques. She is the author of The Gendered Brain, a book on sex differences and the brain.

This page records only her role and affiliation as published. Biography beyond that is not given here.

Key papers

This site has not cited a paper by Rippon directly. Her work enters through The Expectation Effect, chapter 9, "Untapped genius", in a section on the biases that expectations create. There Robson uses her work on two points: the part expectation plays in premenstrual syndrome, and the way gendered expectations shape children's developing brains.

Key ideas

The idea Robson takes from Rippon is that expectations about women and girls are not neutral background. They can shape what is felt, what is reported and how people develop. That fits the book's wider claim, made in its first chapter, that the brain works as a prediction machine whose forecasts shape pain, fatigue and other experience.

The book presents this material without the scientific debate that surrounds questions of sex differences in the brain, and the publication's audit of the book records that it is stated more firmly than the field supports. That is a point about how the book handles the material, not about Rippon's research. For the evidence on premenstrual symptoms specifically, this site relies on the primary studies: Diane Ruble's 1977 experiment, a 1998 study of hormone sensitivity led by Peter Schmidt, and a 2013 daily-mood study led by Sarah Romans.

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