Brain Institute, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte - UFRN, Natal, Brazil.
Department of Physics, Federal University of Pernambuco - UFPE, Recife, Brazil.
PLoS One. 2020 Nov 30;15(11):e0242903. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0242903. eCollection 2020.
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.
当前由新冠疫情带来的全球威胁导致了广泛的社会隔离，这对处理与社交隔离相关的金属性痛苦以及快速学习旨在预防传染的新社交习惯带来了新的挑战。神经科学和心理学都认为，做梦有助于人们应对负面情绪并从经验中学习，但做梦能否有效地揭示精神痛苦和社会行为的变化？为了解决这个问题，我们应用自然语言处理工具研究了 67 个人在新冠疫情爆发前或 2020 年 3 月和 4 月期间（巴西在世卫组织宣布大流行后实施封锁时）所做的 239 份梦境报告。大流行期间的梦境表现出更高比例的愤怒和悲伤词汇，并且与“污染”和“清洁”等术语的平均语义相似度更高。这些特征似乎与社交隔离相关的精神痛苦有关，因为它们解释了与社交相关的 PANSS 阴性子量表中 40%的变异（p=0.0088）。这些结果证实了这样一种假设，即大流行期间的梦境反映了精神痛苦、对传染的恐惧以及对直接影响社交的日常习惯的重要改变。
