Early maternal separation, nightmares, and bad dreams: results from the Hungarostudy Epidemiological Panel.

Early maternal separation is a particularly stressful experience. Current models of nightmare production emphasize negative emotionality as having a central role in determining dream affect. Our aim is to test the hypothesis that persons who experienced early maternal separation (before one year of age and lasting at least one month) report more frequent nightmare experiences and bad dreams as adults. In the frame of the Hungarostudy Epidemiological Panel, 5020 subjects were interviewed. Significant associations were found between early maternal separation and both frequent nightmare experience in adulthood and increased frequency of oppressive and bad dreams. Current depression scores fully mediated the association between early separation and nightmares, but not the association between early separation and negative dream affect. We interpret these findings as a trait-like enhancement of negative emotionality in adults who experienced early maternal separation. This enhancement influences the content of dreams and, when it takes the form of depression, also influences the frequency of nightmares.

Nightmares and bad dreams in patientswith borderline personality disorder: Fantasy as a coping skill?

Background and Objectives: Previous studies reported a high prevalenceof nightmares and dream anxiety in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and the severityof dream disturbances correlated with daytime symptoms of psychopathology. However,the majority of these results are based on retrospective questionnaire-based study designs,and hence the effect of recall biases (characteristic for BPD), could not becontrolled. Therefore our aim was to replicate these findings using dream logs. Moreover,we aimed to examine the level of dream disturbances in connection with measures of emotionalinstability, and to explore the protective factors against dream disturbances.Methods: 23 subjects diagnosed with BPD, and 23 age and gender matched healthycontrols were assessed using the Dream Quality Questionnaire, the Van Dream AnxietyScale, as well as the Neuroticism, Assertiveness and Fantasy scales of the NEO-PI-R questionnaire.Additionally, subjects were asked to collect 5 dreams in the three-week studyperiod and to rate the emotional and phenomenological qualities of the reported dreamsusing the categories of the Dream Quality Questionnaire.Results: Dream disturbances (nightmares, bad dreams, night terror-like symptoms, anddream anxiety) were more frequent in patients with BPD than in controls. Dream disturbancescorrelated positively with Neuroticism, while Fantasy proved to be a negative correlateof dream disturbances (AU)

[Nightmares, dream anxiety and psychopathology: the validation of the Hungarian version of the Van Anxiety Scale]. / Rémálmok, álomszorongás és pszichopatológia: A Van Alomszorongás Skála magyar változatának validálása.

Several research articles have focused on the relationship between nightmares and psychopathology, however a growing number of studies emphasize that nightmare distress may be a better candidate for the prediction of the disturbed mental state, than nightmare frequency itself. At present, validated Hungarian scales measuring nightmare distress are still lacking, therefore are aim was to fill this gap by the psychometric analysis of the Van Dream Anxiety Scale (VDAS), using the data of 140 individuals (70 patients diagnosed with adaptation disorder, and 70 matched controls). The internal consistency of the Scale proved to be considerably good, with the Cronbach-alpha being 0.846 in the control and 0.958 in the clinical group. According to our results the Scale containing 17 items can be reduced to 4 items without loosing relevant information. The patient group reached significantly higher scores on the VDAS than the control one. This could reliably differentiate the two groups. We analyzed the validity of the Scale by correlation analysis with the Dream Recall Scale, the Dream Quality Questionnaire, the Hopelessness Questionnaire, and the Beck Anxiety Questionnaire. Scores of the VDAS showed the predicted correlations with the questionnaires measuring the psychopathological state, and with specific items of the Dream Quality Questionnaire (nightmare frequency and dysphoric dreaming). We consider, that the VDAS is an easily an effectively applicable scale in the fields of clinical and experimental dream research.