Retrospective dream components and musical preferences

Retrospective dream components endorsed on the KJP Dream Inventory were correlated with those on the Short Test of Musical Preference for 68 graduate students in counseling psychology (11 men). Among 40 correlations, 6 were significant between preferences for Heavy Metal and Dissociative avoidance dreams (.32), Dreaming that you are dreaming (.40), Dreaming that you have fallen unconscious or asleep (.41), Recurring pleasantness (.31), and Awakening abruptly from a dream (-.31); between preferences for Rap/Hip-Hop and Sexual dreams (.27); and between preferences for Jazz and Recurring pleasantness in dreams (.33). Subjects preferring Classical music reported a higher incidence of Dreams of flying (.33) and rated higher Discontentedness in dreams (-.26). The meaning of these low values awaits research based on personality inventories and full dream reports.     

Comparison of dream content of depressed vs nondepressed dreamers.

Dreams of 20 college women classified as depressed by scores on the Beck Depression Inventory were compared with those of 21 nondepressed college women. The depressed group recalled fewer dreams, had significantly shorter dream length, and displayed less anger in their dreams. They also had fewer characters in their dreams and especially fewer strangers.     

Last night I had the strangest dream: Varieties of rational thought processes in dream reports

From the neurophysiological perspective, thinking in dreaming and the quality of dream thought have been considered hallucinatory, bizarre, illogical, improbable, or even impossible. This empirical phenomenological research concentrates on testing whether dream thought can be defined as rational in the sense of an intervening mental process between sensory perception and the creation of meaning, leading to a conclusion or to taking action. From 10 individual dream journals of male participants aged 22–59 years and female participants aged 25–49 years, we delimited four dreams per journal and randomly selected five thought units from each dream for scoring. The units provided a base for testing a hypothesis that the thought processes of dream construction are rational. The results support the hypothesis and demonstrate that eight fundamental rational thought processes can be applied to the dreaming process.     

Properties of the organization of memory for people: Evidence from dream reports

Steyvers and Tenenbaum (2005) showed that semantic networks for words have three organizational properties: short average path lengths, high clustering, and power law degree distribution. If these are general properties of memory organization, they would apply to memory for other complex material, including people and relations between them. In addition, if during dreaming, characters are generated via knowledge in the dreamer’s memory, the three properties would be found in a relational network of characters in dreams. In dream reports from three individuals, two characters in the same dream were considered affiliated. Resulting social networks have the three properties, with the power law holding when low degrees are omitted. One network with a treelike outline is different from the other two. Results suggest associative memory has the three properties, and demonstrate that dream reports are a potentially valuable source for information about social networks.     

Automatic gender detection of dream reports: A promising approach

A computer program was developed in an attempt to differentiate the dreams of males from females. Hypothesized gender predictors were based on previous literature concerning both dream content and written language features. Dream reports from home-collected dream diaries of 100 male (144 dreams) and 100 female (144 dreams) adolescent Anglophones were matched for equal length. They were first scored with the Hall and Van de Castle (HVDC) scales and quantified using DreamSAT. Two male and two female undergraduate students were asked to read all dreams and predict the dreamer’s gender. They averaged a pairwise percent correct gender prediction of 75.8% (κ = 0.516), while the Automatic Analysis showed that the computer program’s accuracy was 74.5% (κ = 0.492), both of which were higher than chance of 50% (κ = 0.00). The prediction levels were maintained when dreams containing obvious gender identifiers were eliminated and integration of HVDC scales did not improve prediction.     

Retrospective reports of organizational commitment after Russian military downsizing

This paper assesses the accuracy of people's memories of attitudes and explores sources of errors in the recollection. We did a secondary analysis on a panel survey of the Russian Army's officer corps, conducted before and after its downsizing. The dependent measure was the discrepancy between Army officers' prospective and retrospective organizational commitment ratings made 18 months apart. We linked this discrepancy to the officers' sense of mastery and evaluations of job prospects across the two waves. In general, officers tended to overestimate their prior commitment to the Army. The amount of overestimation was positively related to both officers' initial level and the subsequent increase in mastery, but was negatively related to their perceived immediate job prospects. Possible mechanisms for the distortion and conceptual implications are discussed. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adolescents' music preferences and personality characteristics

The present paper examined the structure of Dutch adolescents' music preferences, the stability of music preferences and the relations between Big‐Five personality characteristics and (changes in) music preferences. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of music‐preference data from 2334 adolescents aged 12–19 revealed four clearly interpretable music‐preference dimensions: Rock, Elite, Urban and Pop/Dance. One thousand and forty‐four randomly selected adolescents from the original sample filled out questionnaires on music preferences and personality at three follow‐up measurements. In addition to being relatively stable over 1, 2 and 3‐year intervals, music preferences were found to be consistently related to personality characteristics, generally confirming prior research in the United States. Personality characteristics were also found to predict changes in music preferences over a 3‐year interval. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Relation of personality characteristics and color preferences

150 students responded to the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule and ranked color plates from the Luscher Color Test. Regression analysis yielded no relationship of predictive significance between the two sets of variables. An ancillary analysis using sets of random numbers in place of the color preference data yielded results basically similar to those produced in the earlier analysis. Males and females rank ordered the colors identically except for yellow, which was significantly more preferred by males than females.     

Antecedents of consumers' citizenship behaviour towards organic foods

Within the consumer behaviour literature, there has been little research on factors that influence customers' choices for organic foods. This study investigates three aspects of the Taiwanese organic food market. The first aspect considers how argument quality, source credibility, and social comparison affect consumer‐social venture identification. The second aspect examines how identity attractiveness, social media engagement, and self‐determination affect personal relevance. The third and final aspect investigates how consumer‐social venture identification and personal relevance influence customer citizenship behaviour. The results show that consumer‐social venture identification and personal relevance have significant and positive effects on customer citizenship behaviour. Furthermore, argument quality, source credibility, and social comparison all have significant and positive effects on consumer‐social venture identification. Finally, identity attractiveness, social media engagement, and self‐determination have significant and positive effects on personal relevance. This study makes three contributions regarding consumers' behaviour of purchasing organic foods. First, it explores whether consumer‐social venture identification and personal relevance are antecedents of customer citizenship behaviour. Second, it investigates whether argument quality, source credibility, and social comparison are antecedents of consumer‐social venture identification. Last, it examines whether identity attractiveness, social media engagement, and self‐determination are antecedents of personal relevance. The practical implications of this study indicate that firms must pay more attention to consumers' information search/sharing and perceptions of a credible environment for sharing information and their awareness about healthy items and personal images on social networking sites.     

Distance education vs face-to-face classes: individual differences, course preferences and enrollment

To understand better students' preferences for enrollment in distance education over face-to-face courses, the individual difference variables of sex, age category, class level, work status, number of distance education courses taken, frequency of computing technology usage, comfort with course management software, and comfort with computing technology were examined. Analysis indicated that older students, women, and those who work full time were more likely to enroll in distance education courses. Those who had taken the most distance education courses in the past and women were more likely to express a stated preference for distance education over face-to-face classes.     

Word associations contribute to machine learning in automatic scoring of degree of emotional tones in dream reports

Scientific study of dreams requires the most objective methods to reliably analyze dream content. In this context, artificial intelligence should prove useful for an automatic and non subjective scoring technique. Past research has utilized word search and emotional affiliation methods, to model and automatically match human judges’ scoring of dream report’s negative emotional tone. The current study added word associations to improve the model’s accuracy. Word associations were established using words’ frequency of co-occurrence with their defining words as found in a dictionary and an encyclopedia. It was hypothesized that this addition would facilitate the machine learning model and improve its predictability beyond those of previous models. With a sample of 458 dreams, this model demonstrated an improvement in accuracy from 59% to 63% (kappa = .485) on the negative emotional tone scale, and for the first time reached an accuracy of 77% (kappa = .520) on the positive scale.     

Retrospective reports of parental physical affection and parenting style: a study of Finnish twins

Individual differences in parenting behaviors are due, in part, to genetic factors. In the present study, the authors sought to determine whether the degree of genetic influence varied according to the type of parental behavior under consideration. A population-based sample of 2,334 pairs of Finnish twins provided ratings on the physical affection, control, abusiveness, and indifference shown by their father and mother during childhood. Genetic influences, shared environmental influences, and nonshared environmental influences accounted for a small-to-medium proportion (17%-30%), a small-to-large proportion (22%-44%), and a medium-to-large proportion (37%-55%) of the variance in each parenting measure, respectively. There were no significant differences in effect sizes for mothers and fathers or across the 4 types of parental behavior. The genetic results may reflect characteristic styles with which parents respond to genetically influenced behaviors of individuals (gene-environment correlations) or individual perceptions of this relationship (gene-person correlation processes). The findings have implications for intervention and prevention work with families and for interpretation of evidence for interactions between genes and parenting behaviors.