Högskolan i Skövde

There is increasing evidence that sleep plays an important role inaffective processing. However, it is unclear whether dreaming—the subjectiveexperiences we have during sleep—also serves an affect regulation function.Here, we investigated the within-person relationship between negative affectexperienced in dreams and next-day waking affect level, affect reactivity,and affect regulation. For 5 days, 40 participants reported their dreams andrated their dream affect and post-sleep waking affect level upon morningawakening. Thereafter, they performed an affect reactivity and regulation taskwhich involved viewing neutral and negative pictures with the instructioneither to simply view the pictures or to down-regulate the affect evoked bythese pictures. Multilevel regression analyses showed that the more negativeaffect people experienced in their dreams at night, the more negative affectand the less positive affect they reported the next morning. However, negativedream affect was associated neither with affect reactivity to the pictures norwith the ability to down-regulate negative affect in response to these pictures.In fact, Bayesian analyses favored the null hypotheses. These findings fail toprovide support for the affect regulation function of dreaming and, instead,speak for affective continuity between dreaming and post-sleep wakefulness.