Content analysis of Chinese dreams—Pleasure or pain?

Chinese and Canadian people answered surveys in their native languages about their self-construal, media use history, and dreaming experiences. This included reporting a recent dream. The nightmare protection thesis was investigated. Sex was found to be modulated by culture in terms of the relationship between types of media used and negative dream content. This was particularly evident for men in Greater China versus Canada along the self-construal dimension of interdependence. As both cultures reported no difference in independent self-construal, it was argued that it is the role of interdependence that accounts for male differences between cultures. In addition, each media type highlighted a different cultural value. Specifically, gaming seemed more consistent with independence, whereas social media was consistent with interdependence. When dreams were considered, source data were important. Specifically, when respondents answered in terms of their impressions of their dream history, high social media users reported more bad dreams across sex and country. However, for the video game groups, a 3-way interaction emerged where country, sex, and gaming evidenced different patterns of bad dream scores. The other self-report dream measure was emotions felt during a recent dream, with general negative and positive emotions showing group differences. Finally, the judges' coding of negative elements of dreams, threat and aggression, was most sensitive to social media effects. Across all the threat simulation interactions where country was an independent variable, the male sex in each country was most likely to show opposite results from the female sex.

Section: Cultural Differences In Dreamingmentioning

confidence: 95%

Media use and gender relationship to the nightmare protection hypothesis: A cross-cultural analysis.

Gackenbach

Lee

2018

“…Copious evidence lends support to the notion that dreams are mostly unpleasant regardless of culture or race (Domhoff, 1996; Hall & Van de Castle, 1966; Merritt et al, 1994; Nielsen et al, 1991; Valli et al, 2005, 2008). This notion still holds true even when adopting the classification systems that equalize the numbers of positive and negative categories for dream coding, such as supplementing the Hall and Van de Castle system (HVC; 1966) with Bulkeley’s (2006) Good Fortune Scale (Hsu & Yu, 2016). The unbalanced categories of positive and negative emotions, therefore, cannot explain the preponderance of dream unpleasantness.…”

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confidence: 99%

Automated analysis of dream sentiment—The royal road to dream dynamics?

Yu¹

2022

Self Cite

Valence Aware Dictionary for sEntiment Reasoning (VADER) is an automated software program for analyzing textual data based on an established lexicon and annotated lexical features. Support-vector machine (SVM) is a popular machine-learning model for solving classification problems. VADER and SVM can serve as potential alternatives to the conventional content analysis and Linguistic Inventory and Word Count analysis of dream emotions. The study presented here aimed to evaluate the overall affective valence of dreams using both the VADER and SVM methods. A total of 2,600 dreams primarily obtained from an open source—including dreams reported by American, German, Hong Kong, Peruvian, and Taiwanese people—were subjected to the 2 automated algorithms for sentiment analysis. The mean VADER and SVM sentiment scores indicate overall balanced sentiment in dream reports. Accordingly, an average dream report contains positive and negative emotions of similar intensity. Notwithstanding their different algorithms and methodological strategies, the marked consistency between the VADER and SVM scoring suggests that VADER and SVM can provide reliable, effective, yet distinct tools for dream sentiment analysis. In addition, the analysis of Chinese people’s dreams suggests that the discrepancy between dream sentiment scored by automated algorithms and subjective feelings experienced by dreamers may reveal some dynamic processes during dreaming, such as working through concerns and desensitizing feelings.

“…Besides negative emotions, all three dream scales have also been demonstrated to vary positively with cheerful emotions and magical ideation and negatively with repressiveness and the NEO-Five Factor Inventory Agreeableness (Yu, 2013a(Yu, , 2013b(Yu, , 2013c. Some evidence (Hsu & Yu, 2016;Yu, 2015) suggests that Chinese people's dreams display less emotional and sexual materials. The collectivist Chinese culture places higher value on composedness than very arousing and explicit emotions (Tsai & Levenson, 1997) and encourages the subordination of individual desires for the sake of group harmony (Markus & Kitayama, 1991).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Dream content varies across times and cultures; nonetheless, some general characteristics of dream content that are shared by different cultures or signify a certain group of individuals have been identified. For instance, Hsu and Yu’s (2016) analysis of most recent and diary dream reports indicates that Chinese people’s dreams are, similar to those of people from other cultures, largely negative. Specifically, aggressive interaction, fearful affect, failure, and misfortune are more common than friendly interaction, joyful affect, success, and good fortune in dreams.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Some evidence (Hsu & Yu, 2016; Yu, 2015) suggests that Chinese people’s dreams display less emotional and sexual materials. The collectivist Chinese culture places higher value on composedness than very arousing and explicit emotions (Tsai & Levenson, 1997) and encourages the subordination of individual desires for the sake of group harmony (Markus & Kitayama, 1991).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Indigenous Chinese personality and dream content of Hong Kong and Taiwanese people.

Yu¹,

Liu²

2022

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This study investigated whether indigenous Chinese personality traits bear on dream content across Hong Kong and Taiwanese people. The sample contained 100 Hong Kong and 103 Taiwanese participants, who were asked to complete the Self Versus Social Orientation, Family Orientation, Harmony, and Thrift Versus Extravagance scales of the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory and provide a dream narrative using the Most Recent Dream Report. Each dream report was coded separately by 2 trained judges using Hall and Van de Castle's content analysis system and Yu's Dream Motif Scale. The overall findings indicate that the 4 indigenous Chinese personality attributes have dynamic implications for dream content. Specifically, people who are more harmonious or more family-oriented encounter fewer ego-centered themes, persecutory themes, and aggressive activities in their dreams. In addition, the positive association between the attribute of thrift and dream grandiosity seems to be stronger among Hong Kong individuals than among Taiwanese individuals. This can be explained by the shared Chinese culture but discrete historical backgrounds of Hong Kong and Taiwan.