Quantitative-Qualitative Assessment of Dream Reports in Schizophrenia and Their Correlations with Illness Severity.
Gianluca Ficca, Oreste De Rosa, Davide Giangrande, Tommaso Mazzei, Salvatore Marzolo, Benedetta Albinni, Alessia Coppola, Alessio Lustro, Francesca Conte
Brain Sciences June 3, 2024 DOI: 10.3390/brainsci14060568 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Observational cohort Qualitative Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Sample size | 74 |
| Population | 46 patients with schizophrenic spectrum disorders and 28 healthy controls |
| Keywords | Dreams Emotion regulation Schizophrenia |
| Citations | 1 |
| Key findings | Patients with schizophrenic spectrum disorders report fewer, shorter, and emotionally impoverished dreams compared to healthy controls, with dream features correlating with symptom severity and verbal fluency. |
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.