Factors Affecting Diagnostic Judgments of Manifest Dream Content in Schizophrenia
Psychological Reports December 1, 1971 DOI: 10.2466/pr0.1971.29.3.811 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Observational study Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Population | Judges with diverse professional training and experience (therapists, hospital professionals, and nonprofessionals) who evaluated dreams of hospitalized schizophrenia and non-schizophrenia patients |
| Topics | Dreaming |
| Key findings | Judges discriminated dreams of hospitalized schizophrenia patients from those of hospitalized non-schizophrenia patients only barely above chance, often misled by an invalid assumption about loss of body integrity and insensitive to thought disorder clues. Length of experience was unrelated to accuracy, but the kind of experience mattered: therapists familiar with both dreams and psychotic patients were most accurate, hospital professionals next, and nonprofessionals least accurate. |
Abstract
Judges with diverse professional training and experience were asked to discriminate the dreams of hospitalized schizophrenics from those of hospitalized nonschizophrenics, a task which proved to be subjectively and objectively extraordinarily difficult. Performing barely above chance expectation as a group, judges tended to be misled by an invalid assumption that material depicting loss of body integrity would be more frequent in the dreams of schizophrenics and relatively insensitive to a valid clue, indications of thought disorder. When judges of similar experience were compared, lengthier experience was unrelated to more accurate judgments. However, when judges with different kinds of experience were contrasted, the kind of experience was strikingly related to accuracy. Judges familiar with dreams and psychotic patients (therapists) were most accurate, judges familiar with psychotic patients but typically not dreams (hospital professionals) were next most accurate while nonprofessionals were least accurate. The importance of attending to the kind of judges' experience—as opposed to amount—in studies of the clinical judgment process was emphasized.
Comparable studies
Other observational and cohort studies on dreaming, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lucid Dreaming: a State of Consciousness with Features of Both Waking and Non-Lucid Dreaming Student volunteers trained to become lucid and signal lucidity with horizontal eye... | 2009 | Observational study | n = 6 |
| Nightmare Prevalence, Nightmare Distress, and Self-Reported Psychological Disturbance Young adults with a mean age of 20 years | 2002 | Prospective observational study | n = 116 |
| Long-term effects of extreme situational stress on sleep and dreaming Survivors of traumatic events who complained of sleep disturbances, compared with... | 1987 | Case-control study | n = 11 |
| The relationship of nightmare frequency and nightmare distress to well‐being Adults who reported dreams | 2004 | Observational cohort | n = 147 |
| The prevalence of nightmares and their independence from anxiety. Undergraduates | 1990 | Observational study using daily dream logs | n = 220 |