Ryan Bernstein’s scientific contributions

What is this page?


This page lists works of an author who doesn't have a ResearchGate profile or hasn't added the works to their profile yet. It is automatically generated from public (personal) data to further our legitimate goal of comprehensive and accurate scientific recordkeeping. If you are this author and want this page removed, please let us know.

Publications (2)


Emotional Language Use in Mind-Wandering and Dream Reports Reflects Mental Well-Being and Ill-Being
  • Preprint

October 2024

·

56 Reads

Nanna Strid

·

·

Ryan Bernstein

·

[...]

·

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.


The architecture of spontaneous thoughts and experiences: a graph theory approach.

April 2024

·

75 Reads

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.