2/14: Dreams

• Researchers wake people in REM
• People tend to dream of things that they did during the day
• Women dream of both men and women equally; men dream mostly about men
• Why do we dream?
• Five theories
• Psychoanalytic Perspective
• Activation- Synthesis
• Neurocognitive theory
• File away Memories
• Develop/Preserve Neuro Pathways
• Psychoanalytic Perspective (Freud)
• Freud suggested unconscious mind can manifest itself in dreams 
• Freud: Dreams = Wish Fulfillment
• Dreams= royal road to understanding unconscious
• Manifest content: what a person remembers and consciously considers
• Latent content: underlying hidden meaning
• Dreams are disguised fulfillment of a repressed, infantile wish
• used free association and dream analysis to access unconscious conflicts that caused patients' problems
• Most adult dreams can be traced to erotic wishes
• Weakness
• Difficult to test scientifically 
• Freud had Dream Symbols
• small animals = children
• journeys = death
• authority figures = parents
• water = birth
• Activation - Synthesis
• brain Experiences Spontaneous activity as Sensation
• inputs from pons activate brain areas that produce images during REM
• increase activity in amygdala(emotion)
• lack of activity in frontal lobes
• responsible for inhibition and logical thinking
• links sensations together, synthesizing them into a coherent pattern
• damage to limbic system or visual systems = dreaming may be impaired
• meaning = individual's personality
• accidental by product of dream
• Weakness
• difficult to test scientifically
• Neurocognitive Theory
• Function of Cognitive Maturation/ special kind of thinking
• persistent activity in cortex
• reduced sensory stimulation
• loss of voluntary control of thinking
• dreaming/ability to recall dreams requires cognitive maturity
• contains elements of "what's on your mind" and draws on our concepts and knowledge
• File away memories
• Info Processing: sort day's experiences and encode them in memory
• people tested next day on a new task show improvement after sleep
• REM sleep: 
• transfer of memory from hippocampus to long-term memory storage
• storage of memory, resolution of emotional experiences and erasure of memory
• Develop/Preserve Neural pathways
• Physiological Function: stimulate brain, developing and preserving neurons
• REM sleep characterized by changes in breathing, blood flow to brain, and brain activity 
• We dream to exercise synapses between brain cells
• infants with developing neural networks have abundant sleep
• Sleep Paralysis
• occurs 40-50% as isolated incident
• typical experience: wakes up, feel paralyzed, sense presence, feels fear, perceives buzzing and strange lights
• occurs during hypnagogic state or the hypnopopic state
• labeled as alien abduction
• other explanations: repeated questioning, peer pressure, hypnosis persuades mind of whtat happened
• Hypnosis
• suggestion that certain perceptions, thoughts, behaviors will occur
• dependent on subject's suggestibility
• anyone who can turn attention inward and imagine is susceptible
• 20% are highly susceptible
• rich fantasy lives 
• induces trance state
• extreme suggestibility, relaxation, heightened imagination
• subject alert the whole time
• compared to daydreaming
• Research
• age regression cannot happen
• suggestion to act like a child in actuality
• suggestible people are often vulnerable to false memory suggestions
• Posthypnotic suggestion: made during hypnosis to be done after hypnosis
• placebo effect is what makes it work
• worked for headaches but not drugs/drinking addictions
• Research done by
• Dywan and Bowers, 1983
• Other methods of Priming
• Priming = triggering schema you aren't consciously aware of
• Conscious Priming techniques
• Memory task
• words asked to memorize = prime 
• Scrambled sentence task
• words in sentence related to prime
• Word search
• Prime embedded in search
• Physical presence of stimuli
• Subliminal Priming
• brief presentation of prime
• immediate masking by another stimulus
• ex: happy followed by xxx
• Bargh, Chen and Burrows experiment (1996)
• IV: Prime
• Elderly  stereotype v. neutral words
• DV: Walking speed
• Result
• priming elderly stereotype did lead to slower walking pace
• Priming can influence subsequent social behavior temporarily