Testing the theory of Differential Susceptibility to nightmares: The interaction of Sensory Processing Sensitivity with the relationship of low mental wellbeing to nightmare frequency and nightmare distress

Abstract

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Relationship between Sensory Processing Sensitivity and Mental Health

“…As for the country of origin, three of the studies were conducted in Japan [10,12,17], two in United States [9,15], and other two in United Kingdom [14,19]. One article was carried out in each of the following countries: Malaysia, Sweden, Denmark, Iran, Israel and China [11,13,16,18,20,21].…”

“…Table 1, which also presents the design of the studies, shows that 11 of the 13 of them were cross-sectional studies [10][11][12][13][14][15][17][18][19][20][21]. One was a cohort study [9] and another one was a longitudinal and seasonally counterbalanced study [16].…”

“…Table 1 indicates the relationship between sensory processing sensitivity and mental health implications in each of the studies included. A positive association between SPS and mental health problems is observed in every study [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. Specifically, five articles point out adaptative disorders (anxiety and depression) as a result of high levels of SPS [9][10][11][12]16,17].…”

“…Specifically, five articles point out adaptative disorders (anxiety and depression) as a result of high levels of SPS [9][10][11][12]16,17]. Four of these studies indicate that high levels of SPS is related to stress [13,14,20,21]. Two of them mention the influence of SPS in obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors [15,18].…”

Dream recall frequency and sensory-processing sensitivity.

“…Functional MRI studies indicate that frontal brain areas (parts of the salience network and default mode network) play a major role in sensory processing sensitivity (Greven et al, 2019) and, thus, would be in line with the findings of Vallat et al (2020) that more intense processing during the awakening process can increase the chance to recall a dream. Neither of the two studies (Carr et al, 2021;Khodarahimi et al, 2021) reporting an association between sensory processing sensitivity and dream recall, however, controlled for possible mediating effects of personality variables like the big five factors. Nevertheless, these two findings indicate that traits that are conceptualized as neurophysiological (Aron et al, 2012) may be related to dream recall frequency and, thus, add a new pathway to the abovementioned psychological pathways (focusing on dreams can increase dream recall) explaining the interindividual differences in dream recall.…”