Antti Revonsuo’s research while affiliated with University of Skövde and other places

Do the words we use reveal how we feel? While much research has explored language use in social media, little is known about how the content of spontaneous thoughts and experiences—daytime mind-wandering and nighttime dreaming—reflects well-being and ill-being. Here, we analyzed 1496 mind-wandering reports (N = 152) and 1781 dream reports (N = 172) using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Participants also self-reported their well-being and ill-being. Multilevel regression analyses showed that ill-being (negative affect, anxiety and depression symptoms) was associated with negative tone and negative emotion words (including anxiety, anger, sadness words) in mind-wandering reports. Although links between ill-being and negative tone in dream reports were weaker, well-being was exclusively associated with positive emotion word use in dream reports. These findings indicate that the way people describe their feelings in reports of different conscious states reflects mental health and may contribute to future diagnostic tools in psychology and psychiatry.

In search for the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs), it is important to isolate the true NCCs from their prerequisites, consequences, and co-occurring processes. To date, little is known about how attention affects the event-related potential (ERP) correlates of auditory awareness and there is contradictory evidence on whether one of them, the late positivity (LP), is affected by response requirements. By implementing a GO-NOGO design with target and nontarget stimuli, we controlled for feature-based attention and response requirements in the same experiment, while participants rated their awareness using a perceptual awareness scale. The results showed a prolonged auditory awareness negativity (AAN) for aware trials, which was influenced neither by attention nor by response requirement. The LP was affected by both attention and response requirements. Consistent with the levels of processing hypothesis, the LP was related to consciousness as a correlate of the processing of higher-level stimulus features, likely requiring access to a “global workspace.” Our findings further suggest that AAN is a proper ERP correlate of auditory consciousness and thus a true NCC in the auditory modality.

The language people use in everyday life provides a window into the mind. Mind-wandering and dreams have been thought to reflect unique individual differences and mental health. Here we use a large dataset of mind-wandering (n=1619) and dream (n=1434) reports from 176 individuals in conjunction with graph theory applied to natural language. We find that dream reports have a more complex structure, while mind-wandering reports have fewer word repetitions and more verbose structure, with essential nodal points in the narrative flux. Dream reports tend to have more thematic repetitions, local cliques, and global integration. Capitalising on a repeated measures design, we found that the structure of dream and mind-wandering reports contains individual-specific information. Finally, we find that word centrality in dreams is predictive of depression symptoms. Thus, this approach is sensitive to individual differences, quantitatively differentiates two distinct contents of consciousness, and seems promising for cost-effective analyses of large naturalistically occurring qualitative datasets.

Previous research indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected dreaming negatively. We compared 1132 dreams collected with prospective two-week dream diary during the pandemic to 166 dreams collected before the pandemic. We hypothesized that the pandemic would increase the number of threatening events, threats related to diseases, and the severity of threats. We also hypothesized that dreams that include direct references to the pandemic will include more threatening events, more disease-related threats, and more severe threats. In contradiction with our hypotheses, results showed no differences between pandemic and pre-pandemic samples in the number of threats, threats related to diseases, or severe threats. However, dreams with direct references to the pandemic had more threats, disease-related threats, and severe threats. Our results thus do not suggest a significant overall increase in nightmarish or threatening dream content during the pandemic but show a more profound effect on a minority of dreams.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, alterations seem to be taking place not only in waking lives but also in dreaming minds. As such, the current pandemic allows people not only a glimpse of the way our dreams change in response to such drastic events but also a way to test specific theories about the functions of dreaming. What, if anything, are dreams for? Specifically, different dream theories propose that they mirror waking life, fulfill wishes, simulate threatening events, aid in social interaction and belonging, and regulate emotions. Given the specific ways the pandemic has affected our lives in the social, economic, and internal spheres, researchers can derive from some dream theories empirical hypotheses on the effects of the pandemic on dream contents. Dreams give a phenomenological perspective on what goes on within our minds when there is minimal or no ongoing external sensory input to furrow one’s experiences. Knowledge on how changes during waking life affect the contents of dreaming can be used for explanation, understanding, and prediction of internal reactions to cataclysmic events.

Well-being consists of several different dimensions, such as hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. However, peace of mind (PoM)-an aspect of well-being characterized by internal peace and harmony-has only recently begun to receive attention. It has been shown that PoM predicts important outcomes, such as depression and anxiety. An open question is what underlies individual differences in PoM. One important factor may be emotion regulation. However, to date, no studies have been conducted on PoM and emotion regulation. Here, we investigated the relationship between individual differences in PoM and trait emotion regulation. In two studies, participants from Finland (Study 1, N = 417) and the US (Study 2, N = 303) completed measures of PoM, trait emotion regulation, and other aspects of well-being and ill-being. Results showed that people with higher levels of PoM displayed a greater tendency to use cognitive reappraisal and a lesser tendency to use expressive suppression. Our findings suggest that adaptive emotion regulation may play an important role in explaining PoM and may serve as a promising target for interventions designed to enhance PoM.

Episodic memories of emotionally salient and personally significant events are often incorporated into dreams, although rarely replayed identically to the original waking event except in replicative posttraumatic nightmares. We investigated, in five Swedish female 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami survivors, how episodic memories of the catastrophe were reflected in their dreams after trauma, both in retrospectively recalled nightmares and bad dreams, and in prospective dream diaries completed several months after the catastrophe. We also assessed whether the emotional and threatening dream content differed between the trauma and a matched control group. Based on the threat simulation theory, we predicted that the trauma group dreams would portray notable similarities with elements related to the original tsunami trauma, and that the trauma group would demonstrate a higher prevalence of negative emotional states, and a higher frequency of threatening dream events as well as more severe threats in their dreams. Only the first hypothesis was partially supported, with retrospective nightmares bearing higher similarity to the trauma experience than the prospective dream diary dreams. However, we observed no statistically significant differences in emotional or threatening dream content between the groups, suggesting that the trauma group participants were not suffering from significant posttraumatic dreaming at the time of systematic dream data collection. Yet, specific features of the trauma group dreams might be interpreted as remnants of episodic tsunami-related memories: Their dreams had a higher percentage of life-threatening events depicting realistic but improbable threats, and an analysis of water-related themes evidenced stressful themes related to waves.