Psychiatric medications produce psychoactive effects similar to recreational substances, a fact often obscured by the assumption that these drugs have disease-specific actions. These psychoactive effects can directly modify disturbing symptoms, but they also carry costs to mental well-being and raise dependence risks, requiring support for withdrawal. The reality that psychoactive effects can alter symptoms independently undermines the idea that psychiatric drugs work by targeting underlying disease processes and affects placebo-controlled trial results. This also challenges the validity of modern diagnostic systems. Extensive research is needed on acute and long-term mental, behavioral, and physical effects during and after consumption and withdrawal to enable informed use.
Adolescents reported more severe psychotic symptoms on the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale than adults, while no significant difference was found in cannabis exposure or Aberrant Salience Inventory scores. A hierarchical pattern emerged among adult subgroups, with psychotic patients scoring higher than other psychiatric and neurological patients. The findings suggest that aberrant salience, and to a lesser degree cannabis use, may contribute to psychotic symptom severity, particularly during more at-risk developmental phases. The role of cannabis in this relationship remains unclear.
Three studies indicate that reports of having no dream content and reports of having no dream at all are distinct phenomena, not a single category of nonrecall. Distributions of these two types of reports differed across menstrual cycle phases, across three consecutive nights of recording, and with total sleep time. The authors suggest that researchers should separate contentless and dreamless reports in future work.
Longer total sleep time predicts more dream recall for men, but not significantly for women, though the trend is in the same direction. This confirms earlier findings that total sleep time is important for men's dream recall and suggests that the factors determining dream recall may differ between sexes.
Psychological traits like anxiety, repression, and cognitive style show little to no connection with how often or how much people remember their dreams, unlike psychophysiological factors such as sleep stage and auditory arousal thresholds. Two studies found no evidence for a link between dream recall and short-term memory for verbal or visual material. These results align with the general lack of strong, empirically supported relationships between personality variables and dream recall frequency.