Nightmare frequency, personality and acute psychopathology

Abstract

There are currently contradictory findings on whether frequency of having nightmares is related to psychopathology. Common drawbacks of many of the studies are the use of a single retrospective questionnaire to assess nightmare frequency and the measurement of stable traits rather than acute stress. In the present study 124 subjects (males, n=32; females, n=92; age 18–70 years) completed the EPQ-RS, the General Health Questionnaire-30, Gough's Creativity Scale and, over 14 days, a contemporaneous log of the incidence of nightmares. The 14-day log method produced a larger estimate of mean nightmare frequency (41.7 per year) than is common with retrospective measures; there was no significant difference in frequency of nightmares between males and females. Nightmare frequency correlated significantly with GHQ acute psychopathology ( r sp=0.26, p=0.002), with comparable scores for females ( r sp=0.28) and males ( r sp=0.23). Females had significant correlations of nightmare frequency with age ( r sp=−0.26, p=0.007), dream recall ( r sp=0.32, p=0.001) and EPQ-Lie score ( r sp=−0.22, p=0.020), whereas males did not: following regression analysis only females had significant determinants of nightmare frequency, these being GHQ acute psychopathology ( β=0.300, p=0.003) and age ( β=−0.232, p=0.020). Neither sex had significant correlations of nightmare frequency with creativity, extraversion, neuroticism or psychoticism.