Emotions in dream and waking event reports.

Abstract

Twenty participants hand-wrote reports of their dreams and waking life events and used an extensive lexicon of emotion words and types to rate the emotions experienced in each scene of each report. From these ratings, the incidence and intensity of 22 different emotion types in the two kinds of report were assessed. The incidence of emotion categories specified by a cognitive model of emotions was also assessed. Emotions were found to be present in virtually all scenes of all dream reports and only one of the 22 emotion types was never used in the ratings. The incidence of most of the emotion types was similar to that of reports of important life events. There was also evidence that the incidence of positive emotions was lower in dream reports than event reports, while the incidence of fear was higher. Specifically, the mean number of positive emotions per scene was lower and the proportion of fear was higher in dream reports than in event reports. These results are consistent with the notion that emotion is as much a part of dream experience as it is of important waking life experience. However, the results also indicate some unique features of these dream reports. The pattern of differences may be due to a process of emotion production that inhibits positive emotions while facilitating fear during dreaming. Such a process might also explain the frequent occurrence of frightening nightmares and may be consistent with a theory of dream function in which dreaming regulates emotion during sleep. Introduction Estimates of emotions in dream reports vary widelye. Some early studies suggested that emotions in dreams were both infrequent and lacking in salience. One widely cited study (Snyder, 1970) concluded that emotion is typically either absent during dreaming--appearing in less than 35% of reports--or vague in quality when it appears. Another study found emotion in only 12.5% of laboratory dream reports (McCarley & Hobson, 1979). However, in more recent studies where laboratory participants were directly probed for emotional content or were allowed to rate emotion in their own reports, emotions were found to be more frequent, in the order of 70-75% (Foulkes, et al., 1988; Strauch, 1988; Strauch & Meier, 1989; Strauch, Loepfe, & Meier, 1987; Deslauriers, 1990). Studies of home dreams in which participants were provided with an adapted version of Izard's (1977) differential emotions scale suggested even higher frequencies of emotions (Stairs & Blick, 1979; Howe & Blick, 1983). Two methodological factors may explain these widely different estimates of emotions in dreams. First, in the earlier studies participants were not queried specifically about emotions. They may thus have inadvertently omitted emotional descriptors from their dream reports, in a manner similar to participants recalling storied material (e.g., Stein & Glenn, 1979). Second, in the early studies independent judges rated emotional content, a procedure known to correlate poorly with participant ratings (e.g., Sandler, Kramer, Trinder, & Fishbein, 1970; Stairs & Blick, 1979). In contrast, when participants themselves report emotions or are given specific scales for rating their emotions, the frequency of emotions is much greater. It is also noteworthy that some studies have found negative emotions to be more prevalent than positive emotions in dream reports. Several laboratory studies (Foulkes, Kerr, Sullivan & Brown, 1986, see review in Strauch, 1988; Snyder, 1970) and home dream studies (Hall & Van de Castle, 1966) concur on the finding that over 2/3 of dream emotions are negatively toned. Not all laboratory studies report such a high incidence, however (Strauch, 1988; Strauch & Meier, 1989). The above evidence taken together suggests that emotions may be more frequent in dream reports than previously thought. The accessibility of emotions in dream reports seems to be enhanced when participants themselves score their reports, preferably with the aid of a suitable lexicon of emotional descriptors. Moreover, a large proportion of dream emotions tends to be negative in tone. Theoretical Roots of the Lexicon-Assisted Scoring Procedure. To facilitate participants' selfreporting of emotions in the present research we used a lexicon-assisted collection and scoring procedure that is based, in part, upon a cognitive model of emotion (Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988). The model identifies 11 positivelyand 11 negatively-valenced basic emotion types and connects these types to everyday language with a lexicon of 127 alternative emotion 'tokens' (see Appendix 1). Use of the 22 types in conjunction with the expanded lexicon of tokens allows participants to identify and quantify a wide range of basic emotion types while not seriously limiting their preference for particular expressive words. The model underlying this lexicon reflects but one of many psychological perspectives on emotion production (cf. Frijda, 1986). It regards emotions as valenced reactions to specific external stimuli and it describes the kinds of event, character and object stimuli that lead to qualitatively different reactions (Ortony, et al., 1988). In the case of dreaming, however, it is not necessarily true that emotions are valenced reactions to stimuli that appear in the content of the dream. Emotions may be but one of several simultaneous expressions of multi-modal, centrally activated, imagery schemas (cf. Lang, 1979), or they may, themselves, determine the selection of actions, characters, and objects in the formation of a dream--perhaps as components of an 'affective script' (e.g., Tomkins, 1979; Kuiken, 1986). Nevertheless, the Ortony, et al. model was chosen for the present research because its stimulus/response assumptions (reflected in its 18 emotion categories, see Table 2) may specify important associations between dream contents and emotions, regardless of the possible causal relationships between them during dream formation. To summarize, the principal goal of the present study was to characterize emotions in dream reports using a method which would facilitate participants' identification and reporting of their emotions. A second goal of the study was to compare the emotions in dream reports with those in waking event reports.