[The role of neuroticism, resilience and coping in the occurrence of nightmares].

INTRODUCTION

Several studies have found a link between nightmares, coping styles and personality traits. Based on these findings, the present research aims to investigate a possible function of nightmares and the relationship between dreams and personality traits in a Hungarian sample. We hypothesized that nightmares will be positively re lated to emotion-oriented coping and negatively related to resilience, when examined from the perspective of personality traits.

METHODS

Our hypothesis was tested quantitatively using online self-administered tests. Our self-report, cross-sectional study included 100 healthy subjects: 27 men and 73 women. The age of the respondents ranged from 18 to 69 years (M=32.1 years, SD=15.1 years). The sleep quality of the respondents was assessed by the Sleep Quality Questionnaire (Kovács, Vargha, Ali, and Bódizs, 2010), and their resilience level by the Connor-Davidson Resilience Questionnaire (Járai, Vajda, Hargitai, Nagy, Csókási, and Kiss, 2015), coping style was measured with the Folkman and Lazarus Coping Questionnaire (Koop and Skrabski, 1995), while personality traits were measured with the TCI-55 (Szántó, Susánszky, and Martos, 2016).

RESULTS

Our findings demonstrate a positive association between nightmares and neuro ticism, and a negative association between nightmares and resilience. Our results also support contextualization and simulation models of nightmares, suggesting that nightmares are a possible form of emotion-oriented coping. The limitation of our study is the small number of items and the poor reliability of the scale measuring emotion-oriented coping. A complicating factor for the generalizability of the results is that we could not take into account all of the factors which are influencing the constructs under study. Our future objective is to eliminate these limiting factors and to further develop the study paradigm.

CONCLUSIONS

Given the obtained correlations, the presence of nightmares have high clinical relevance when planning therapeutic interventions.