Verbal data files including dream reports and associations with the report items were subjected to automatic analysis aiming at the recognition of word recurrences. The research was based on the following assumptions: the associations can provide information about the dream sources; the recognition of word recurrences in text files can be a useful tool for the study of dreaming; the identification of links between different dream sources can provide an interesting insight into the phenomenon of dreaming. The principal result obtained was that word recurrences often evidence possible significant links between dream sources. A number of the possible links evidenced by the automatic analysis not only escaped the subject's notice, but might also be unexpected for an analyzer not assisted by a computer.
The impact of psychosocial and behavioral factors on Cancer Related Cognitive Impairment manifestations is still under debate. Study's purpose is to determine the prevalence rate of cancer related cognitive impairment in a cohort of Italian breast cancer patients and to evaluate the implication of specific behavioral factors. For these purposes, a total of 233 women (106 breast cancer patients and 127 age-matched controls without oncological diagnosis) completed a questionnaire investigating cognitive functionality (FACT-Cog v3.0), sociodemographic characteristics, clinical information, psychosocial and behavioral factors (cognitive reserve, sleep quality, dietary habits, physical activity). The results indicated a higher prevalence rate of subjective cognitive complaints in breast cancer patients (37%) compared to a representative sample of women in the same age group without an oncological diagnosis (p < 0.001). Moreover, breast cancer patients showed significantly lower levels of cognitive reserve (p < 0.05) and worse sleep quality (p < 0.01) compared to age-matched controls. Further analysis revealed that breast cancer patients reporting subjective cognitive complaints differed significantly from breast cancer patients without subjective cognitive complaints on measures of perceived cognitive abilities (p < 0.001) and on the impact of cognitive difficulties on perceived quality of life (p < 0.01). Future studies are needed to examine behavioral directed interventions to prevent subjective cognitive deficits in breast cancer patients.
A microanalysis of fourteen dream reports was conducted with the aim of understanding which features of these reports rendered them more or less narrative. The result should help us to compare the relative narrative quality of samples of dream reports. The reports described the last dream of the night and they were collected immediately upon spontaneous morning awakening in a sleep laboratory. Half of the dreams reported in our sample were produced in Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and the other half in Stage 2 sleep. The microanalysis dealt with the relationship between each pair of successive temporal units and with the presence of other elements of the dream content likely to influence the narrative character of a dream. The more important findings were the following. First, coherence is the rule in the relationship between pairs of successive units of the reported dream sequences. Second, two categories of relationship, Psychologically causal links and Plausible links appear to be the main building blocks of the sequences of dream events. Third, most dreams comprised one or several complications, that is, events creating change and often tension. Fourth, the combination of a continuity score and a complication score permitted us to rank the reports ac - cording to their narrative nature or quality, whereas emotions and story-like features were not good candidates to that purpose. Fifth, no differences were observed between REM-sleep and Stage 2 reports of similar length in their sequential regulation and other features. This result shows that the process regulating the sequences of dream events is not de - pendent on the sleep stage, a strong argument in favor of the idea of a single generator which produces dreams across the sleep stages. More generally, most sequences of dream events did not correspond to sequences of recent or older experiences stored in memory. The sequential organization of dream events is regulated during dreaming and reveals an important dreaming production process.
Reports of 56 dreams from 5 subjects, given upon awakening during the second REMP, were analyzed and compared with a further 3 reports of each dream, obtained the following morning, 3 days, and 1 wk. later, using a system of Coding Units (CUs) and the Scoring System for Latent Structure of Foulkes. There were no significant differences between the second, third, and fourth reports, while the most important differences between the first and subsequent reports concerned: (a) a decrease in the number of CUs, words and sentences as indicated by the scoring; (b) a partial restructuring of the material, interpretable as secondary revision; (c) a decrease in the motivational component (interactive sentences) vs the cognitive component (associative sentences); (d) a decrease in the interactive sentences with Ego present in the text vs those without Ego present. Results are discussed in the light of interference and repression hypotheses.
The Incentive Sensitization Theory of Addiction claims that drug induced sensitization of the mesocorticolymbic system increases the salience of the drug related stimuli. In so doing, drug related stimuli become attention grabbing for an addictive person. We tried to understand the socio-cognitive underpinnings of this process in case of alcohol addiction. The present study involves a group of participants that had alcohol related problems and a non clinical sample. We suggest that two implicit automatic mechanisms could predict the attention towards alcohol related stimuli: the self relevance of the alcohol related stimuli and the evaluation attributed to the same stimuli. The Implicit Association Task was used to determine the strength of these mechanisms (i.e., self-relevance and alcohol evaluation). The attention toward alcohol related stimuli was assessed with the Visual Dot Probe Task. Results showed that the two groups significantly differed on the IAT scores, indicating stronger associations between self and alcohol, and between alcohol and positive words for participants that had alcohol related problems. Moreover a stronger association between the self and the alcohol was a significant and positive predictor of the attentional salience of the alcohol stimuli for the clinical sample, but not for the control group.
Perception, Mental Imagery, and Dreaming. Memory and Dreaming. Speech and Thinking in Dreams. Dreams and Computer Modelling. Dreaming: A Connectionist Approach. Dreaming and Problem Solving. Effects and Uses of Dreams. Dreaming and Cognitive Development. General Summary.
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