title: Anxiety upon Awakening and Attributes of Dream Characters
creator: Saez-Uribarri, Iñigo
subject: Cognitive Psychology
subject: Evolutionary Psychology
subject: Psycholinguistics
description: Objective: To explore the attributes of dream characters related to anxiety upon awakening, and the possibility of using these attributes to construct a questionnaire administered to dreamers as an alternative to traditional methods of dream content coding via trained judges, such as those of Hall and Van de Castle and Gottschalk-Gleser. Method: A sample of 169 volunteers rated their dream characters with adjectives. Character attributes related to anxiety upon awakening were analysed through an exploratory factor analysis with orthogonal rotation. Results: With 37 character attributes a KMO sampling adequacy index of 0.83 was obtained and 33.87% of the variance was explained. Four factors were extracted: Psychological Threat, Auxiliary, Terrifying Threat and Spectator/Victim. Their corresponding alpha coefficients ranged between 0.85 and 0.73 and three of the factors presented significant (p £ 0.05)correlations with the anxiety of subjects upon awakening. Conclusions: Our results indicate that self-report questionnaires about subjects’ dreams are a reliable and valid alternative for assessing dream content. Information obtained about the characters allows for the assessment of the dream and provides indicators which allow for a simple interpretation, which does not contain biases due to the assessor or the ability of the subject to create a report.
publisher: SES - Sociedad Española de Sueño
date: 2008
type: Journal (Paginated)
type: PeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: http://cogprints.org/7069/4/Dream_Characters.pdf
identifier:   Saez-Uribarri, Iñigo  (2008) Anxiety upon Awakening and Attributes of Dream Characters.  [Journal (Paginated)]     
relation: http://cogprints.org/7069/