Dissociated Effects of Age and Recent Troubling Experiences on Nightmares, Threats and Negative Emotions in Dreams

Abstract

Several studies have highlighted associations between adverse life events and the dysphoric character of dream experiences. This degree of continuity between waking-life and dream content seems partly attributed to the emotional and personal attachment linked to the incorporated waking experiences. Numerous changes in the processing of emotion-related stimuli are also reported across different human developmental stages. Therefore, we were interested in testing whether age would modulate the impact of recent troubling experiences on dream characteristics. Two hundred sixty participants, evenly distributed in five developmental stages, matched for gender and their exposure to a troubling experience, were selected from a large sample collected for a previous normative study of dreams of Canadians. Participants completed a dream questionnaire from which independent judges subsequently scored the dreams. We observed no interactions between the experience of troubling events and age. However, individuals who experienced a recent troubling event reported a higher frequency of nightmares and their dreams were more emotionally negative. Participants who experienced a moderately severe troubling event were also more likely to experience a dream whose maximal threat severity was of moderate intensity. Adolescents and young adults had dreams with a higher level of oneiric threats compared to older adults (>40 years old). Young adults also reported a higher frequency of nightmares compared to older adults. Our findings have implications for modern dream theories. They also suggest that dysphoric dreams might serve as potential proxies of mental health status and developmental stages. Future studies are now needed to explore the implications of these findings for psychological adaptation.

Dreamers’ evaluation of the emotional valence of their day-to-day dreams is indicative of some mood regulation function

“…Furthermore, Vallat et al (2018) also observed that dreams contribute to emotion regulation, such that subjects whose dreams reflected their waking-life experiences perceived their dreams more positively than the actual event. This finding is further corroborated by our recent study that demonstrated that subjects who had experienced a recent troubling life event had a higher level of negative emotions but similar levels of positive emotions in their dreams compared to those who did not have a recent troubling experience (Barbeau et al, 2022). Both of these studies support the notion that dreams can contribute to psychological adaption by aiding in the integration and consolidation of emotions through a process of desensitization, which may have the potential to positively affect subsequent waking-life.…”

“…Future studies should strive to replicate our findings across all ages to understand the impacts of age on the degree of the subject's positivity bias and its ability to contribute to mood regulation. Despite previous research suggesting that positive emotions reported by dreamers do not differ by developmental stages (Barbeau et al, 2022), it is still plausible that the subject's may differ in their degree of positivity bias depending on their age. Finally, our results are correlational in nature; therefore, we cannot infer that the relationships that we observed are causal.…”

Dangerous waters: The impact of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami on survivor dream content.

“…Hence, we did not observe any clear sign of posttraumatic dreaming in the form of increased negative emotional content in our sample, opposite to what is predicted by the TST. In another sample, however, it has been recently shown that people with a troubling experience during the past year tend to report more nightmares and a higher level of negative emotions in their dreams (Barbeau et al, 2022).…”

Negative dream affect is associated with next-day affect level, but not with affect reactivity or affect regulation

“…It is also possible that waking affect regulation is not associated with dream affect in general but with those affective experiences in dreams that are related to the processing of particularly salient memories of real-life experiences ( Malinowski and Horton, 2015 ). Similarly, it is likely that the affect regulation function is only apparent when individuals experience a certain level of stress during the day that then activates the need for regulation ( Levin and Nielsen, 2007 ; Barbeau et al, 2022b ). Although the findings regarding the relationship between pre-sleep affect and dream affect are mixed (e.g., Koulack et al, 1985 ; Gilchrist et al, 2007 ; Yu, 2007 ; cf.…”