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Background: This article reports on the relationship between cultural influences on life style, coping style, and sleep in a sample of female Portuguese immigrants living in Germany. Sleep quality is known to be poorer in women than in men, yet little is known about mediating psychological and sociological variables such as stress and coping with stressful life circumstances. Migration constitutes a particularly difficult life circumstance for women if it involves differing role conceptions in the country of origin and the emigrant country.
Methods: The study investigated sleep quality, coping styles and level of integration in a sample of Portuguese (N = 48) and Moroccan (N = 64) immigrant women who took part in a structured personal interview.
Results: Sleep quality was poor in 54% of Portuguese and 39% of Moroccan women, which strongly exceeds reports of sleep complaints in epidemiologic studies of sleep quality in German women. Reports of poor sleep were associated with the degree of adoption of a German life style. Women who had integrated more into German society slept worse than less integrated women in both samples, suggesting that non-integration serves a protective function. An unusually large proportion of women preferred an information-seeking (monitoring) coping style and adaptive coping. Poor sleep was related to high monitoring in the Portuguese but not the Moroccan sample.
Conclusion: Sleep quality appears to be severely affected in women with a migration background. Our data suggest that non-integration may be less stressful than integration. This result points to possible benefits of non-integration. The high preference for an information-seeking coping style may be related to the process of migration, representing the attempt at regaining control over an uncontrollable and stressful life situation.
Dreams and psychosis share several important features regarding symptoms and underlying neurobiology, which is helpful in constructing a testable model of, for example, schizophrenia and delirium. The purpose of the present communication is to discuss two major concepts in dreaming and psychosis that have received much attention in the recent literature: insight and dissociation. Both phenomena are considered functions of higher order consciousness because they involve metacognition in the form of reflective thought and attempted control of negative emotional impact. Insight in dreams is a core criterion for lucid dreams. Lucid dreams are usually accompanied by attempts to control the dream plot and dissociative elements akin to depersonalization and derealization. These concepts are also relevant in psychotic illness. Whereas insightfulness can be considered innocuous in lucid dreaming and even advantageous in psychosis, the concept of dissociation is still unresolved. The present review compares correlates and functions of insight and dissociation in lucid dreaming and psychosis. This is helpful in understanding the two concepts with regard to psychological function as well as neurophysiology.
Transcranial alternating-current stimulation (tACS) in the frequency range of 1–100 Hz has come to be used routinely in electroencephalogram (EEG) studies of brain function through entrainment of neuronal oscillations. It turned out, however, to be highly non-trivial to remove the strong stimulation signal, including its harmonic and non-harmonic distortions, as well as various induced higher-order artifacts from the EEG data recorded during the stimulation. In this paper, we discuss some of the problems encountered and present methodological approaches aimed at overcoming them. To illustrate the mechanisms of artifact induction and the proposed removal strategies, we use data obtained with the help of a schematic demonstrator setup as well as human-subject data.
The present study examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the emotional quality of dreams, the incorporation of pandemic-related themes, and the occurrence of lucid dreaming. Dream reports and lucidity ratings of psychiatric outpatients (n = 30) and healthy controls (n = 81) during two lockdowns in Germany were compared to those of healthy controls (n = 33) before the pandemic. Results confirmed previous reports that pandemic-specific themes were incorporated into dreams. Overall, however, incorporation into dreams was rare. Contrary to expectations, psychiatric outpatients did not differ from controls in the frequency of dream incorporation of pandemic-related content. Moreover, incorporation was independent of psychiatric symptoms and loneliness. Loneliness was, however, associated with threat-related content, suggesting that it represents a risk for bad dreams but not for crisis-specific dream incorporation. Regarding lucid dreaming, both groups had similar scores for its underlying core dimensions, i.e., insight, control, and dissociation, during the two lockdowns. Scores for control and dissociation but not insight were lower compared to the pre-pandemic sample. Our working hypothesis is that REM sleep during lockdowns intensified as a means of increased emotional consolidation, rendering the associated mental state less hybrid and thereby less lucid.