STUDY OBJECTIVES: The relationship between nightmare prevalence, nightmare distress, and self-reported psychological disturbance was assessed prospectively. DESIGN: Differences in self-reported psychological disturbance as a function of nightmare prevalence was investigated by MANCOVA's with non-nig

STUDY OBJECTIVES: The relationship between nightmare prevalence, nightmare distress, and self-reported psychological disturbance was assessed prospectively. DESIGN: Differences in self-reported psychological disturbance as a function of nightmare prevalence was investigated by MANCOVA's with non-nightmare dreams as the covariate as well as Pearson correlations. The relative contribution of nightmare prevalence and distress to the prediction of psychological disturbance was investigated through multiple regression analyses. SETTING: N/A. PARTICIPANTS: 116 participants (mean age = 20 years) completed self-report indices of depression, anxiety, dissociation, psychosis-proneness, and a psychiatric symptom checklist and kept a nightmare log for 21 consecutive nights. INTERVENTIONS: N/A. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS: Frequent nightmares were associated with higher levels of psychological disturbance. Individuals who reported 3 or more nightmares across the 3 weeks reported more dissociation, psychosis-proneness and psychiatric symptoms than participants reporting 2 nightmares or less. However, nightmare prevalence and distress were not significantly correlated and differentially predicted to different types of waking psychological disturbance. Multiple regressions further indicated that nightmare distress accounted for much of the unique explanatory variance in predicting clinical states associated with high negative affect (anxiety and depression). Last, there was no evidence for a specific relationship between nightmares and psychosis-proneness. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that it is not the incidence of nightmares which is associated with poorer waking psychological functioning, especially anxiety and depression states, but the reported distress associated with the nightmare experience which is the critical variable in predicting higher psychological disturbance.

A contextualized image is a powerful central image in a dream which provides a picture context for the dominant emotion of the dreamer. This study examined the psychopathological correlates of both dream and nightmare contextualized images in a community-based sample of 378. As predicted, mean night

A contextualized image is a powerful central image in a dream which provides a picture context for the dominant emotion of the dreamer. This study examined the psychopathological correlates of both dream and nightmare contextualized images in a community-based sample of 378. As predicted, mean nightmare contextualized image scores were significantly higher than mean dream scores. In addition, while dream contextualized images were unrelated to psychopathology, nightmare contextualized images were significantly associated with elevated scores on three SCL-90-R subscales and the General Symptom Distress Index.

In order to investigate both the psychometric structure of the Dissociative Experiences Survey (DES) and the discriminant validity of the DES-Taxon (Waller, Putnam, & Carlson, 1996) as a specific marker of pathological dissociation, 376 non-clinical community based respondents completed the DES

In order to investigate both the psychometric structure of the Dissociative Experiences Survey (DES) and the discriminant validity of the DES-Taxon (Waller, Putnam, & Carlson, 1996) as a specific marker of pathological dissociation, 376 non-clinical community based respondents completed the DES and a battery of psychopathology and imaginative involvement self-report measures. The DES was scored for both the Taxon and the DES-Absorption subscale. A DES subscale purported to tap normative dissociative processes. The two DES subscales demonstrated substantial overlap, both with each other (r = .80) and with the self-report measures with both DES scales comparably associated with high levels of psychological distress. Both DES subscales were also associated with elevated levels of "normative" imaginative involvement (fantasy proneness, absorption, daydreaming immersion). We conclude that both DES scales are largely indistinguishable from each other in relation to other self-report measures of psychopathology and fantasy access.

Self-reported sleep complaints and current cognitive functioning were assessed in 375 nondemented participants ages 75 to 85 years (134 men and 241 women) as part of enrollment in the Bronx aging study, an ongoing longitudinal community-based study of cognitive aging. This study only reports on the

Self-reported sleep complaints and current cognitive functioning were assessed in 375 nondemented participants ages 75 to 85 years (134 men and 241 women) as part of enrollment in the Bronx aging study, an ongoing longitudinal community-based study of cognitive aging. This study only reports on the baseline data collected from 1980 to 1983. Sleep complaints were common, occurring in about 25% of the sample. Furthermore, after controlling for depression, use of hypnotic medication, physical morbidity, age, and education, participants who reported longer sleep onset latencies performed significantly worse on measures of verbal knowledge, long-term memory and fund of information, and visuospatial reasoning. Participants who reported longer sleep durations did significantly worse on a measure of verbal short-term memory. These results suggest that perceived sleep is related to select objective cognitive abilities even when accounting for commonly recognized mediating variables, such as depression, medical comorbidity, age, or use of hypnotic medication. Given the restricted range of this nondemented sample, these results may underestimate the relation between cognitive abilities and sleep.

Nightmares are common, occurring weekly in 4%-10% of the population, and are associated with female gender, younger age, increased stress, psychopathology, and dispositional traits. Nightmare pathogenesis remains unexplained, as do differences between nontraumatic and posttraumatic nightmares (for t

Nightmares are common, occurring weekly in 4%-10% of the population, and are associated with female gender, younger age, increased stress, psychopathology, and dispositional traits. Nightmare pathogenesis remains unexplained, as do differences between nontraumatic and posttraumatic nightmares (for those with or without posttraumatic stress disorder) and relations with waking functioning. No models adequately explain nightmares nor have they been reconciled with recent developments in cognitive neuroscience, fear acquisition, and emotional memory. The authors review the recent literature and propose a conceptual framework for understanding a spectrum of dysphoric dreaming. Central to this is the notion that variations in nightmare prevalence, frequency, severity, and psychopathological comorbidity reflect the influence of both affect load, a consequence of daily variations in emotional pressure, and affect distress, a disposition to experience events with distressing, highly reactive emotions. In a cross-state, multilevel model of dream function and nightmare production, the authors integrate findings on emotional memory structures and the brain correlates of emotion.

Nightmares are a prevalent parasomnia associated with a range of psychiatric conditions and pathological symptoms. Current knowledge about how nightmares are produced is still influenced by neo-psychoanalytic speculations as well as by more recent personality, evolutionary and neurobiological models

Nightmares are a prevalent parasomnia associated with a range of psychiatric conditions and pathological symptoms. Current knowledge about how nightmares are produced is still influenced by neo-psychoanalytic speculations as well as by more recent personality, evolutionary and neurobiological models. A majority of these models stipulate some type of emotionally adaptive function for dreaming, e.g., image contextualization, affect desomatization, mood regulation or fear extinction. Nightmares are widely seen to be either an intensified expression of an emotionally adaptive function or, conversely, as evidence of its breakdown. Our recent, affective network dysfunction (AND) model, integrates the tenets of many prior models in proposing that nightmares reflect problems with the fear extinction function of dreaming. This new model accounts for a wide range of dysphoric dream imagery (bad dreams, idiopathic nightmares, post-traumatic nightmares) and incorporates recent findings in the areas of brain imaging, sleep physiology, PTSD, anxiety disorders and the consolidation and extinction of fear memories.