Role of Dream as a Model for Psychosis - Research Paper Example

?Research Paper Critique Bibliography Scarone, S., Manzone, M.L., Gambini, O., Kantzas, I., Limosani, I., D’Agostino, A., & Hobson, J.A. (2008). The dream as a model for psychosis: An experimental approach using bizarreness as a cognitive marker. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 34(3), pp. 515-522. Doi: 10.1093/schbul/sbm116. Why I chose this topic and how I found it? I chose this topic because I am very much interested in the neurochemistry of dreams and how they are interpreted in the scientific language. I found this research paper through Google. It is a case study journal found in the Schizophrenia Bulletin. Summary The topic of the article is the role of dream as a model for psychosis. To clarify, psychosis is a severely disturbed mental state or disorder in which the person loses association with the real world and loses in his own confused fantasies. According to the author, there are many similarities between the normal psychological state of dreaming and the abnormal psychological state of psychosis. As the topic of the journal article clearly suggests, there are many similarities between dreaming and psychosis. In both the conditions, the person experiences bizarreness of mental state, feelings and experiences. The authors have given reference to many researchers like Jung (1907) and Freud (1958) who conducted studies on the similarities of behaviors shown by dreamers and psychotic persons, but the implication here is that the authors did not explain past researches’ methodology, participants and statistics due to which we are not able to actually compare the findings of this research and past research works. There is not even one research work whose methodology and participants have been discussed. However, the problem statement goes well with the title the authors have suggested and has good scholastic importance. The research hypothesis was that dream is a neurobiological model for psychosis. The hypothesis was testable and explained the problem surely well. The research question was- can a dreaming brain be considered as a useful experimental model for psychosis? Although very briefly, but the authors have given a good review of literature citing other researchers’ works and mentioning their findings in order to support the need to conduct this specific research. They have cited many researches which discuss the importance of study of dream in understanding the states of psychosis and shezophrenia. The research works in this manner studied by the authors came from Carl Gustav Jung (1907), Sigmund Freud (1958), Eugene Bleuler (1966), Eugene Minkowski (1997), and Capon (1959). The authors show major criticism in previous works and have stated that previous works have not very well focused on how much psychosis resembled the dreaming brain. While explaining the cited literature’s discrepancies, the authors state that the researchers have not focused on formal cognitive bizarreness and its relationship with the psychopathological features of schizophrenic patients. Here, I would like to clarify to the reader that cognitive bizarreness is the state of disassociation and discontinuity experienced in the dreaming state. The authors assert that despite all past research, this study would fill the gap in the existing literature by giving even greater consideration toward understanding dream, formal cognitive bizarreness, and its relationship with acute episodes of psychosis. One important implication is that the authors have studied literature most of which belongs to the period of 1907-2000 and very less literature belonging to the last decade; hence, we can say that the literature studied is not very current as most of it belongs before the last decade. The authors have used an empirical approach. The design is naturalistic as it talks about a human phenomenon of dream and congruencies and association of patterns during dreaming. The methodology used to gather statistics and information to carry out the research has been fairly explained by the authors. The authors mentioned the population and sample but did not mention the age and gender of the participants which are important factors influencing the results. The target population includes 30 actively psychotic, schizophrenic patients and 30 normal controls. The psychotic patients were on therapy with antipsychotic and hypnotic drugs; however, the names of the drugs have not been mentioned. One implication that comes here is that when patients were on drugs, this could hinder with the dream recall and activity. However, this limitation has also been mentioned by the authors. Another implication here is that the sample size was very small and more participants were needed to acquire accurate results. Exclusion criteria have been mentioned which include any past history with disorders other than schizophrenia. The authors have mentioned that past research focused more on sex-related dissimilarities in dream content because past researchers thought that dreaming patterns were different on the two sexes. However, I also believe that male and female minds behave in different ways and they perceive things differently from each other. So, according to me, this research also should have considered sex-related differences in dreaming patterns because it is a very important factor that has been neglected while selecting the sample population. The researchers stated that not considering this factor will make the study unbiased in the evaluation of results but this is not a logical statement. According to the authors, they took informed consent from all the participants before starting the research process, which means that they gave consideration to ethical issues that might arise during the research process. The data was collected through 420 waking fantasies (in which 210 came from schizophrenic subjects and 210 from normal controls) and 244 dream reports (in which 121 reports came from schizophrenic subjects and 123 from normal controls). The author used the grounded theory’s inductive analytic approach to study the patterns arising within a normal and a psychotic human mind during dream and wakefulness. The collected data helped the judges to measure bizarreness using dream reports and two-way analysis of covariance for repeated measures, which was a special tool to measure the bizarreness. The researchers found that the formal cognitive bizarreness was considerably lower in the wakefulness stories of normal participants than in those of schizophrenia patients, and in the dream reports of both groups. The take-home message is that the waking cognition of schizophrenic patients is much similar to the cognitive bizarreness shown by the dream reports of both normal controls and schizophrenics. I believe that the findings defended the hypothesis in that the dream could be used to understand psychosis because the bizarreness in the stories of dream and waking fantasies told by psychotic patients was similar to the bizarreness in the dream stories of normal persons. However, the research could be more promising had the above mentioned implications not been there. It was a well systematized research project with some implications in the comparison with past research and sampling procedure. While comparing the study with past research works, the authors state that this study focused more on formal cognitive and bizarre patterns and the degree to which these patterns related to the psychotic mind; however, their claims only seem superficial because their findings are a duplication of the past research except one factor- the degree to which dream resembles psychosis. The findings did not mention which specific kind of psychosis mimics dreaming where in the start, the authors had mentioned that this study will focus on this issue. The authors recommend that since this is the first study of its type, hence in future research and as a next step, its results should be carefully evaluated and replicated; while, I wonder how the results can be replicated in future researches. Overall, it is a good addition to the research base related to the relationship between dream and psychosis. It relates to our study of neurochemistry of dream that we studied in class and increases my knowledge about dream patterns and their similarities with a psychotic mind. Read More