Nightmare experience and personality disorder functioning styles in healthy volunteers and nightmare disorder patients
Xu Shao, Chu Wang, Chanchan Shen, Yanli Jia, Wei Wang
Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic September 1, 2020 DOI: 10.1521/bumc.2020.84.3.278 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Cross-sectional study Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Sample size | 337 |
| Population | 219 healthy volunteers and 118 nightmare disorder patients |
| Topics | Dreaming |
| Keywords | Borderline personality disorder Avoidant personality disorder Clinical psychology Sadistic personality disorder Personality disorders Psychoanalysis |
| Citations | 1 |
| Key findings | Nightmare disorder patients scored significantly higher than healthy volunteers on nightmare frequency, nightmare experience scales, and several personality disorder styles, with different personality traits predicting nightmare experience in each group. |
Abstract
Nightmares are prevalent in psychiatric disorders, and personality disorder features might be associated with nightmare experience, especially in nightmare disorder patients. The authors invited 219 healthy volunteers and 118 nightmare disorder patients to undergo tests of the Nightmare Experience Questionnaire (NEQ), the Parker Personality Measure (PERM), and the Plutchik-van Praag Depression Inventory. Compared to healthy volunteers, nightmare disorder patients scored significantly higher on annual nightmare frequency and NEQ Physical Effect, Negative Emotion, Meaning Interpretation, and Horrible Stimulation, and higher on PERM Paranoid, Schizotypal, Borderline, Histrionic, Narcissistic, Avoidant, and Dependent styles. Borderline, Schizotypal, and Passive-Aggressive styles in healthy volunteers and Dependent, Avoidant, Histrionic, and Paranoid in patients were significant predictors of some NEQ scales. Higher annual nightmare frequency, higher scale scores of nightmare experience and personality disorder styles, and more associations between the two were found in nightmare disorder patients, implying the need for personality-adjustment therapy for nightmare disorder.
Comparable studies
Other cross-sectional and survey studies on dreaming, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Insomnia Symptoms, Nightmares, and Suicidal Ideation in a College Student Sample Undergraduate students at a large, public university in the southeastern United States | 2011 | Observational cross-sectional survey | n = 583 |
| Prevalence and Correlates of Frequent Nightmares: A Community-Based 2-Phase Study Middle-aged Hong Kong Chinese adults from the community, mean age 40.9 years (SD 5.5,... | 2010 | Cross-sectional survey with subsequent clinical evaluation (two-phase design) | n = 8,558 |
| Factors of home dream recall: a structural equation model Adults (general population sample) | 2003 | Cross-sectional survey with structural equation modeling | n = 444 |
| The Phenomenology of Lucid Dreaming: An Online Survey Respondents to an online survey about lucid dreams | 2014 | Online survey | n = 684 |
| Frequency of Lucid Dreaming in a Representative German Sample Representative sample of German adults | 2011 | Cross-sectional survey | n = 919 |
Citations in the library
Cites 15
- Nightmare Prevalence, Nightmare Distress, and Self-Reported Psychological Disturbance Sleep 2002
- The relationship of nightmare frequency and nightmare distress to well‐being Journal of Sleep Research May 26, 2004
- Prevalence and Correlates of Frequent Nightmares: A Community-Based 2-Phase Study Sleep June 1, 2010
- Nightmares in Patients with Psychosis: The Relation with Sleep, Psychotic, Affective, and Cognitive Symptoms The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry August 1, 2015
- Nightmares in the general population: identifying potential causal factors Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology July 15, 2017
and 10 more in the library