EMOTION PROFILES IN THE DREAMS OF MEN AND WOMEN

We have investigated the emotional profile of dreams and the relations hip between dream emotion and cognition using a form that specifically asked subjects to identify emotions within their dreams. Two hundred dream reports were collected from 20 subjects, each of whom produced 1 0 reports. Compared to previous studies, our method yielded a 10-fold increase in the amount of emotion reported. Anxiety/fear was reported most frequently, followed, in order, by joy/elation, anger, sadness, s hame/guilt, and, least frequently, affection/eroticism. Unexpectedly, there was no significant difference in the profiles of emotion reporte d by men and women. When the reports were scored for bizarreness, a si gnificant correlation was found between the occurrence of bizarreness and major shifts in emotion. These results support the conclusion that dreaming is a mental state whose general emotional features are widel y shared across individuals and strongly linked to cognitive features within individual dreams. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.