Saturday, February 27, 2021

- Research Blog 6 - Final Research Proposal -





 - Final Research Proposal - 


~ WORKING TITLE~

1. Lucid  Dreaming and Nightmares: Do Video Games Work?
2. Lucid Dreaming as Therapy: Will Video Games Help?
3. Lucid Dreaming and Nightmares

~ TOPIC DESCRIPTION ~

    I will be looking into lucid dreaming (LD) and its overall potential in the psychology world. To be more specific, I will be examining LD's potential clinical application as a therapeutic intervention for those suffering from nightmare disorders. Furthermore, this paper will attempt to understand LD through a multidisciplinary lense, tackling psychology and neuroscience, in order to understand the conscious process of LD and its related frequency and distress. 

~ RESEARCH QUESTION ~

    The main research questions is this; Can sleep disorders, specifically related to nightmares, be tempered through training via controlled dreaming, aka LD, and can the use of video games supplement lucid dreaming therapy (LDT) for greater outcomes/success rates?

~ THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ~

    According to a research article titled Expanding Self-Help Imagery Rehearsal Therapy for Nightmares With Sleep Hygiene And Lucid Dreaming: A Waiting- List Controlled Trial, written by Jaap Lancee, J. wan den Bout, and Victor I Spoormaker in 2010, nightmares are a “common disorder affecting 2-5% of the general population” (111). Among those who suffer from nightmares, they are found to have poor sleep hygiene, meaning that they often experience disturbed sleep which inflicts distress during the daytime. Nightmares have been conceptualized as a sleep disorder and because of this it is diagnosable and can be treated. Through the use of a cognitive-behavioral intervention, Imagery Rehearsal Therapy (IRT), where you imagine the nightmare while awake, and exposure, which helps in desensitization, nightmares are manageable. These are self-help formats that were then expanded to include Lucid Dreaming Therapy (LDT) to help further enhance the effectiveness of the treatment. In addition to that, it was found to be plausible that nightmares can trigger lucid dreaming because there is a moderate correlation between nightmare frequency and lucid dreaming frequency. 

           Unfortunately, this study was done in the Netherlands and not in the United States so the statistics may be off, but the articles that were cited in its intro can help look at the relationship between lucid dreaming and nightmares globally. I will also be looking at the relationship between lucid dreaming and video games, and so a part of my paper will be discussing how video games can help supplement LDT and possibly encourage greater effectiveness. Because the topic seems to be approaching a more psychological lens, I have more interest due to my major being psychology and my general interest in unconventional treatment methods for different mental illnesses/disorders such as the use of VR, virtual reality, with patients suffering from PTSD. There will also be a lot more neuroscience than I initially thought as there lucid dreaming has been proven to be a real phenomenon that the brain undergoes and can train to do. And so, I will be trying my best to deliver the terms as clearly as I can.


~ CASE(S) or EXAMPLES ~


    There is a book titled Emotions, Technology, and Digital Games written by Johnathan Brown and Jayne Gackenbach that has a chapter titled Video games, Nightmares, and Emotional Processing. In this chapter, Gackenbach and Brown summarize the research that supports the hypothesis that playing video games can help grant gamers protection from nightmares and that this can alter emotional processing and regulation during the daytime when they are awake. There is something that is called the nightmare protection effect that is mentioned in the chapter to be related to threat stimulation theories that suggest that humans have the basic need of wanting to rehearse threatening situations as a form of survival adaptation. And so, the usage of violent video gameplay may help to subvert this process and thus remove the need for nightmare virtual rehearsal. It also mentioned that those who participated were students and active-duty soldiers and that females were not included in the study. Thus, making one of my examples being an examination of male students and active-duty soldiers who play violent video games and their effects concerning nightmares and how they may be connected to lucid dreaming. 


~ WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY ~

Bown, Johnathan, and Jayne Gackenbach. “Video Games, Nightmares, and Emotional Processing.” Emotions, Technology, and Digital Games, Academic Press, 25 Mar. 2016, (RUID ACCESS NEEDED) www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128017388000014#:~:text=More%20presence%20in%20video%20games,control%20dreaming)%20and%20nightmare%20protection.&text=Anecdotally%2C%20experiences%20of%20increased%20lucid,our%20laboratory%20following%20VR%20gameplay.

de Macêdo, Tainá Carla Freitas, et al. “My Dream, My Rules: Can Lucid Dreaming Treat Nightmares?” Frontiers in Psychology, Frontiers Media S.A., 26 Nov. 2019, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6902039/.

Lancee, Jaap, et al. “Expanding Self-Help Imagery Rehearsal Therapy for Nightmares with Sleep Hygiene and Lucid Dreaming: A Waiting-List Controlled Tria.” International Journal of Dream Research, vol. 3, no. 2, 2010, doi:10.11588/ijodr.2010.2.6128.

Stumbrys, Tadas, et al. “Induction of Lucid Dreams: A Systematic Review of Evidence.” Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 21, no. 3, 2012, pp. 1456–1475., doi:10.1016/j.concog.2012.07.003. (RUID ACCESS NEEDED)

Voss, Ursula, et al. “Measuring Consciousness in Dreams: the Lucidity and Consciousness in Dreams Scale.” Consciousness and Cognition, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2012, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23220345/.  (RUID ACCESS NEEDED)






0 comments:

Post a Comment