Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Quantitative-Qualitative Assessment of Dream Reports in Schizophrenia and Their Correlations with Illness Severity

Gianluca Ficca
,
Oreste De Rosa
ORCID logo ,
Davide Giangrande
,
Tommaso Mazzei
,
Salvatore Marzolo
,
Benedetta Albinni
,
Alessia Coppola
,
Alessio Lustro
,
Francesca Conte
* ORCID logo
Version 1 : Received: 7 May 2024 / Approved: 7 May 2024 / Online: 7 May 2024 (23:48:18 CEST)

How to cite: Ficca, G.; De Rosa, O.; Giangrande, D.; Mazzei, T.; Marzolo, S.; Albinni, B.; Coppola, A.; Lustro, A.; Conte, F. Quantitative-Qualitative Assessment of Dream Reports in Schizophrenia and Their Correlations with Illness Severity. Preprints 2024, 2024050406. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202405.0406.v1 Ficca, G.; De Rosa, O.; Giangrande, D.; Mazzei, T.; Marzolo, S.; Albinni, B.; Coppola, A.; Lustro, A.; Conte, F. Quantitative-Qualitative Assessment of Dream Reports in Schizophrenia and Their Correlations with Illness Severity. Preprints 2024, 2024050406. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202405.0406.v1

Abstract

Dreams and positive symptoms of schizophrenia are similar in many aspects, such as bizarre-ness, impairment of reality testing, intense emotional participation. Hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thoughts have been proposed to be an intrusion of the dreaming state in wake-fulness: conversely, psychotic patients’ abnormal cognitive and behavioral features could over-flow into sleep, transferring peculiar features to their dreams which would differ, in quantity and quality, from those of healthy people. Here we assess this latter hypothesis by analyzing the dreams of 46 patients, hosted in a residential facility or in a day-treatment center, affected by disorders of the schizophrenic spectrum with psychotic symptoms, versus those of 28 healthy controls, in terms of several quantitative and qualitative characteristics. In patients, we also in-vestigated whether dream variables correlated with the severity of symptoms assessed via the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale. Overall, patients reported fewer and shorter dreams than controls, with a reduction of many ele-ments like characters and settings. The greatest differences regarded emotions, which were less frequent in patients and inversely correlated with symptoms’ severity. This evidence supports the hypothesis that dreams are crucial for emotion regulation during wakefulness and that this func-tion could be totally or partially ineffective in psychoses.

Keywords

Dreams; Schizophrenia; Emotion Regulation

Subject

Social Sciences, Cognitive Science

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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