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Dreaming during the Covid-19 pandemic: Computational assessment of dream reports reveals mental suffering related to fear of contagion

The current global threat brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has led to widespread social isolation, posing new challenges in dealing with metal suffering related to social distancing, and in quickly learning new social habits intended to prevent contagion. Neuroscience and psychology agree that dr...

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Autores principales: Mota, Natália Bezerra, Weissheimer, Janaina, Ribeiro, Marina, de Paiva, Mizziara, Avilla-Souza, Juliana, Simabucuru, Gabriela, Chaves, Monica Frias, Cecchi, Lucas, Cirne, Jaime, Cecchi, Guillermo, Rodrigues, Cilene, Copelli, Mauro, Ribeiro, Sidarta
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7703999/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33253274
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242903
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author Mota, Natália Bezerra
Weissheimer, Janaina
Ribeiro, Marina
de Paiva, Mizziara
Avilla-Souza, Juliana
Simabucuru, Gabriela
Chaves, Monica Frias
Cecchi, Lucas
Cirne, Jaime
Cecchi, Guillermo
Rodrigues, Cilene
Copelli, Mauro
Ribeiro, Sidarta
author_facet Mota, Natália Bezerra
Weissheimer, Janaina
Ribeiro, Marina
de Paiva, Mizziara
Avilla-Souza, Juliana
Simabucuru, Gabriela
Chaves, Monica Frias
Cecchi, Lucas
Cirne, Jaime
Cecchi, Guillermo
Rodrigues, Cilene
Copelli, Mauro
Ribeiro, Sidarta
author_sort Mota, Natália Bezerra
collection PubMed
description The current global threat brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has led to widespread social isolation, posing new challenges in dealing with metal suffering related to social distancing, and in quickly learning new social habits intended to prevent contagion. Neuroscience and psychology agree that dreaming helps people to cope with negative emotions and to learn from experience, but can dreaming effectively reveal mental suffering and changes in social behavior? To address this question, we applied natural language processing tools to study 239 dream reports by 67 individuals, made either before the Covid-19 outbreak or during the months of March and April, 2020, when lockdown was imposed in Brazil following the WHO’s declaration of the pandemic. Pandemic dreams showed a higher proportion of anger and sadness words, and higher average semantic similarities to the terms “contamination” and “cleanness”. These features seem to be associated with mental suffering linked to social isolation, as they explained 40% of the variance in the PANSS negative subscale related to socialization (p = 0.0088). These results corroborate the hypothesis that pandemic dreams reflect mental suffering, fear of contagion, and important changes in daily habits that directly impact socialization.
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spelling pubmed-77039992020-12-03 Dreaming during the Covid-19 pandemic: Computational assessment of dream reports reveals mental suffering related to fear of contagion Mota, Natália Bezerra Weissheimer, Janaina Ribeiro, Marina de Paiva, Mizziara Avilla-Souza, Juliana Simabucuru, Gabriela Chaves, Monica Frias Cecchi, Lucas Cirne, Jaime Cecchi, Guillermo Rodrigues, Cilene Copelli, Mauro Ribeiro, Sidarta PLoS One Research Article The current global threat brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has led to widespread social isolation, posing new challenges in dealing with metal suffering related to social distancing, and in quickly learning new social habits intended to prevent contagion. Neuroscience and psychology agree that dreaming helps people to cope with negative emotions and to learn from experience, but can dreaming effectively reveal mental suffering and changes in social behavior? To address this question, we applied natural language processing tools to study 239 dream reports by 67 individuals, made either before the Covid-19 outbreak or during the months of March and April, 2020, when lockdown was imposed in Brazil following the WHO’s declaration of the pandemic. Pandemic dreams showed a higher proportion of anger and sadness words, and higher average semantic similarities to the terms “contamination” and “cleanness”. These features seem to be associated with mental suffering linked to social isolation, as they explained 40% of the variance in the PANSS negative subscale related to socialization (p = 0.0088). These results corroborate the hypothesis that pandemic dreams reflect mental suffering, fear of contagion, and important changes in daily habits that directly impact socialization. Public Library of Science 2020-11-30 /pmc/articles/PMC7703999/ /pubmed/33253274 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242903 Text en © 2020 Mota et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Mota, Natália Bezerra
Weissheimer, Janaina
Ribeiro, Marina
de Paiva, Mizziara
Avilla-Souza, Juliana
Simabucuru, Gabriela
Chaves, Monica Frias
Cecchi, Lucas
Cirne, Jaime
Cecchi, Guillermo
Rodrigues, Cilene
Copelli, Mauro
Ribeiro, Sidarta
Dreaming during the Covid-19 pandemic: Computational assessment of dream reports reveals mental suffering related to fear of contagion
title Dreaming during the Covid-19 pandemic: Computational assessment of dream reports reveals mental suffering related to fear of contagion
title_full Dreaming during the Covid-19 pandemic: Computational assessment of dream reports reveals mental suffering related to fear of contagion
title_fullStr Dreaming during the Covid-19 pandemic: Computational assessment of dream reports reveals mental suffering related to fear of contagion
title_full_unstemmed Dreaming during the Covid-19 pandemic: Computational assessment of dream reports reveals mental suffering related to fear of contagion
title_short Dreaming during the Covid-19 pandemic: Computational assessment of dream reports reveals mental suffering related to fear of contagion
title_sort dreaming during the covid-19 pandemic: computational assessment of dream reports reveals mental suffering related to fear of contagion
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7703999/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33253274
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242903
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