Eighty-two undergraduate participants kept dream diaries for a month. Five dreams were randomly selected from each diary and were returned to participants. They rated the affect produced by the dream at its occurrence and at its recall, as well as a number of other characteristics of the dream and characteristics of the context in which the dream occurred. Results revealed that, like memories for real autobiographical events, the negative affect associated with dreams generally faded faster than the positive affect associated with dreams (a Fading Affect Bias, or FAB). The data also showed that the FAB did not occur for: (a) dreams that were remembered to contain information that dreamers believed came true at a later date, (b) dreamers who had reportedly taken recreational drugs prior to their dream, (c) dreams remembered as lacking sound, and (d) dreams remembered as very quiet. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Original article written by Ritchie, Timothy D.; Skowronski, John J.

This article demonstrates that elicited dream narratives use a differing narrative structural and functional framework, as proposed by Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) narrative framework on elicited personal narratives. A quantitative structural and functional analysis of five male and female collected samples showed that dream narratives follow a homogenous structure of (1) Topic introduction, (2) Orientation, (3) Complication, (4) Evaluation, and (5) Coda, consequently reflecting the omission of Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) proposed resolution unit, which confirms Labov’s (1997) suggestion of the difficulty to distinguish between resolution and coda. Moreover, this article devotes attention to specific structural particularities, proposing that analepses and prolepses might indicate, firstly, the simultaneous processing of new spatial information and new protagonists, and secondly, reflecting indirectly the experience of dream bizarreness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Original article written by Cariola, Laura Annamaria

Although several studies reported a significant effect with regard to the gender difference in an interest in dreams, the generalizability of these studies is limited because mainly students were recruited as participants. In this study, gender differences with regard to interest in dream interpretation as an indicator of interest in dreams in general have been demonstrated in a representative sample. There was, however, a significant age-gender interaction, indicating that interest in dreams might not be a potent variable for explaining gender differences in dream recall. In future studies, the course of interest in dreams over the life span and any associated gender differences should be investigated using carefully designed scales. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Original article written by Schredl, Michael; Piel, Edgar

The present study investigated the prevalence profile and frequencies of typical dream themes experienced by Chinese people. The Typical Dreams Questionnaire was administered to 348 university students in Hong Kong. The results demonstrated that the prevalence profile of the typical dream themes for the Chinese participants resembled those profiles previously reported by Western studies. In addition, the present study found large positive correlations between the rank-ordered prevalence and frequency scores of the typical dream themes. This implied that the most prevalent themes were also more likely to be the most recurrent themes and vice versa. Therefore, typical dream themes not only are shared by many people but also tend to be repeatedly experienced within a person. This result supports the postulation that typical dreams are distinguished by both their universality and recurrence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Original article written by Yu, Calvin Kai-Ching

A number of studies investigating trace eyeblink conditioning have found impaired, but not eliminated, acquisition of conditioned responses (CRs) in both animals and humans with hippocampal removal or damage. The underlying mechanism of this residual learning is unclear. The present study investigated whether the impaired level of learning is the product of residual hippocampal function or whether it is mediated by another memory system that has been shown to function normally in delay eyeblink conditioning. Performance of bilateral medial temporal lobe amnesic patients who had a prior history of participating in eyeblink conditioning studies was compared to a control group with a similar training history and to an untrained control group in a series of single cue trace conditioning tasks with 500 ms, 250 ms, and 0 ms trace intervals. Overall, patients acquired CRs to a level similar to the untrained controls, but were significantly impaired compared to the trained controls. The pattern of acquisition suggests that amnesic patients may be relying on the expression of previously acquired, likely cerebellar based, procedural memory representations in trace conditioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

Original article written by McGlinchey, Regina E.; Capozzi, Stephen M.; Fortier, Catherine Brawn; Disterhoft, John F.