Abstract
The Coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) pandemic posed a significant challenge to the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of each individual. It also brought the importance of daily emotional management for survival to the forefront of every human being. Our study aims to explore whether emotional processes perform different functions during waking thoughts and night dreams during the first lockdown in Italy. Utilizing Multiple Code Theory (MCT), our goal is to verify whether waking thoughts facilitate a functional disconnection in order to manage the trauma caused by COVID-19. Two online forms were distributed to random participants in the general population, presenting a total of 49 reports of night dreams (23 males; mean age 33.45 ds. 10.12; word mean 238.54 ds. 146.8) and 48 reports of waking thoughts (25 males; mean age 34.54 ds. 12.8; word mean M. 91 words ds. 23). The Referential Process linguistic measures and Affect Salience Index were utilized. It was found that Affect Salience is present in both dreams and in waking thoughts; however, Referential Activity was higher in dreams and Reflection and Affect words were higher in waking thoughts. Two different processes of emotional elaboration emerged. The results highlight the use of greater symbolization processes during dreams and a higher emotional distance in waking thoughts. These results confirm that during the nocturnal processes, there is greater contact with the processing of trauma, while during the diurnal processes, defensive strategies were activated to cope with and manage life via a moment of the defensive disruption of daily activities.
Highlights
A Traumatic Global ExperienceDreaming and the Narrative Process During COVID-19The present research project aims to offer an analysis and understanding of affective processing processes during a very difficult moment of human existence, such as the experience of the COVID19 pandemic, which involved every single inhabitant of the earth.The processing of emotional trauma is a theme that has been extensively studied (Murray and Segal, 1994; Rachman, 2001), but to date, new questions have emerged regarding it
While many researchers have focused on the impact of COVID-19 on mental health, the intent of this work is to explore, given the same traumatic event, how emotional processing processes perform different functions during dreams and waking thoughts
Given this collective traumatic event, our research aims to explore whether emotional processing mechanisms perform distinctive tasks when writing reports of waking thoughts vs. writing reports of night dreams during the first lockdown in Italy
Summary
A Traumatic Global ExperienceDreaming and the Narrative Process During COVID-19The present research project aims to offer an analysis and understanding of affective processing processes during a very difficult moment of human existence, such as the experience of the COVID19 pandemic, which involved every single inhabitant of the earth.The processing of emotional trauma is a theme that has been extensively studied (Murray and Segal, 1994; Rachman, 2001), but to date, new questions have emerged regarding it. Dreaming and the Narrative Process During COVID-19. The present research project aims to offer an analysis and understanding of affective processing processes during a very difficult moment of human existence, such as the experience of the COVID19 pandemic, which involved every single inhabitant of the earth. While many researchers have focused on the impact of COVID-19 on mental health, the intent of this work is to explore, given the same traumatic event, how emotional processing processes perform different functions during dreams and waking thoughts. We have tried to combine and compare the two types of writing to investigate how mental processes are adaptive to highly stressful events trying to preserve the main tasks of daily life
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