Quantitative–Qualitative Assessment of Dream Reports in Schizophrenia and Their Correlations with Illness Severity

Author:

Ficca Gianluca1,De Rosa Oreste12ORCID,Giangrande Davide1ORCID,Mazzei Tommaso13ORCID,Marzolo Salvatore34,Albinni Benedetta1,Coppola Alessia1ORCID,Lustro Alessio1ORCID,Conte Francesca1ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Department of Psychology, University of Campania “L. Vanvitelli”, 81100 Caserta, Italy

2. Dermatology Unit, Department of Mental and Physical Health and Preventive Medicine, University of Campania “L. Vanvitelli”, 80138 Naples, Italy

3. Residential Community for Therapy and Rehabilitation “Al di là dei sogni (Beyond Dreams)”, 81037 Sessa Aurunca, Italy

4. Mental Health Unit 15, Local Health Authority 1, 81016 Piedimonte Matese, Italy

Abstract

Positive symptoms of schizophrenia have been proposed to be an intrusion of dreaming in wakefulness; conversely, psychotic patients’ abnormal cognitive and behavioral features could overflow into sleep, so that their dreams would differ from those of healthy people. Here we assess this hypothesis by comparing dream features of 46 patients affected by schizophrenic spectrum disorders to those of 28 healthy controls. In patients, we also investigated correlations of dream variables with symptom severity and verbal fluency. Overall, patients reported fewer and shorter dreams, with a general impoverishment of content (including characters, settings, interactions) and higher spatiotemporal bizarreness. The number of emotions, mainly negative ones, was lower in patients’ reports and correlated inversely with symptom severity. Verbal fluency correlated positively with dream report length and negatively with perceptive bizarreness. In conclusion, our data show a significant impoverishment of dream reports in psychotic patients versus controls. Future research should investigate to what extent this profile of results depends on impaired verbal fluency or on impaired mechanisms of dream generation in this population. Moreover, in line with theories on the role of dreaming in emotion regulation, our data suggest that this function could be impaired in psychoses and related to symptom severity.

Publisher

MDPI AG

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