Bad Dreams Essay

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Narrative Qualities of Bad Dreams and Nightmares Purpose. The purpose of the research is to extricate the differences between the content of nightmares and that of bad dreams. Researchers hypothesized that in comparison to bad dreams, nightmares would exhibit higher levels of emotionality, negative affect, death references, and aggression. Additionally, it was posited that higher levels of aggression would include greater degrees of aggressive intensity, number of aggressive acts, and victimization. Design. This research engaged a correlational design, with the two dependant variables being “bad dreams” and “nightmares”. The six independent variables were “negative emotion”, “positive emotion”, “number of references to death”, …show more content…

In order to operationalize the constructs of interest, disturbed dreaming types were conceptually defined, with differentiation equating to nightmares, not bad dreams, causing the dreamer to wake up. Dream content was operationalized through its identification via the use of The Daily Dream Log (DDL; Levin & Fireman, 2002), which also tallied dreams types, and provided written narratives of disturbed dreams. Predictor variables were operationalized through the use of The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker et al., 2001) which identified words in participants’ written narratives related to each predictor variable. The measurement of predictor variables was then made possible by Hall and Van de Castle’s coding system (HVC; 1966), by placing the identified words into categories related to the predictor variables. More specifically, the negative emotion and positive emotion variables were operationalized through the summation of words falling into their respective HVC categories. In addition, a researcher designed 9-point Likert scale measured the degree of emotionality linked to each dream. The number of references to death variable was measured through a summation of words in its HVC category. The severity of aggression variable was measured by placing the coded words into a variety of aggression type categories, and subsequently converting them into an ordinal scale. The intensity of aggression variable was measured through a researcher designed 9-point Likert scale. Finally, the degree of victimization variable was measured through a summation of words in its HVC

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