Angry Dreams Leave A Mark On Your Brain
Angry Dreams Leave A Mark On Your Brain
April 16, 2019
Researchers have identified a pattern of brain activity that reflects anger experienced during dreaming according to a new study carried out on healthy adults and published in The Journal of Neuroscience. The study helps to clarify the neural basis of dream emotions.
Although emotions are experienced during both the waking and dreaming state, few studies have investigated the brain mechanisms underlying the affective component of dreams. Doctoral Candidate in Psychology Pilleriin Sikka alongside other researchers from the University of Turku in Finland, University of Skövde in Sweden, and University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom discovered a shared emotional mechanism between the two states of consciousness.
The researchers obtained electroencephalography recordings from participants during two separate nights in a sleep laboratory. After five-minute bouts of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, participants were woken and asked to describe their dreams and rate the emotions they experienced in the dreams.
“We found that individuals who displayed greater alpha-band brain activity in the right frontal cortex as compared to the left during evening wakefulness and during REM sleep experienced more anger in dreams. This neural signature is known as frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA),” explains Pilleriin Sikka, who is the main author of the study.
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