The role of dreaming in waking emotion regulation

Dream emotions are hypothesized to reflect daytime feelings and concerns, assist waking emotion regulation, or be otherwise closely connected with waking emotional processing in several leading theories of dreaming. However, due to the scarcity of empirical research on this subject, whether or how dream emotions relate to waking emotion regulation remains to be elucidated.

To this end, five studies will be conducted.

• Study I investigates the relationship between dream emotions and waking emotion regulation with electroencephalography (EEG).
• Study II explores the relationship between frontal alpha asymmetry - an EEG marker of emotion regulation – and dream emotions by means of EEG and online dream diaries.
• Study III and IV investigate the link between dream emotions and habitual emotion regulation in wakefulness by measuring both trait and state (daily) emotion regulation.
• Study V compares the relationship between dream emotions and trait emotion regulation in wakefulness across Western and Eastern societies.

This is the PhD project of Enyu Lin, supervised by Dr. Pilleriin Sikka and professor Antti Revonsuo.