Personality and Individual Differences
Personality and Individual Differences
4 years ago

Does alexithymia moderate the relation between stress and general sleep experiences?

A tendency for experiencing unusual dream and sleep-wake transition phenomena (e.g., recurrent dreams, hypnagogic hallucinations, and confusion upon awakening), labeled general sleep experiences (GSEs), is linked with stress as well as psychological distress, explicit as well as covert. We hypothesized that alexithymia may moderate the relationship between stress and GSEs. Undergraduate students (N =187) completed online questionnaires; Three months later, n =78 of them reported perceived stress and dreaming each day for 14days. Regression analyses for trait data and multilevel modeling for daily diary data both revealed a pattern of two competing alexithymic mechanisms: difficulty in identifying feelings was related to increased GSEs, whereas externally-oriented thinking was related to decreased GSEs. As hypothesized, a cross-level interaction was found: daily stress predicted daily GSEs of the following night, only among those who reported difficulty identifying their emotions. It seems that those who experience GSEs following stress, tend to be internally-oriented (i.e., notice their inner experiences), yet find it difficult to understand and identify those experiences. GSEs seem to represent a nocturnal manifestation of unprocessed emotion.

Publisher URL: www.sciencedirect.com/science

DOI: S019188691730613X

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.