Phenomenological psychology has emphasized that experience as it is immediately "given" to the experiencing individual is an appropriate subject matter for psychological investigation. Consideration of the methodological implications of this stance suggests that certain text analytic and cluster analytic methods could be used to discern the identifying properties of different types of experience. We present results of a study in which textual analysis was used to identify recurrent properties of participants' verbal accounts of their experience, cluster analysis was used to (...) classify participants' accounts according to the similarity of their profiles of properties, and the resulting clusters were examined for their more or less characteristic prpoerties. Using these methods, three distinct types of experience of a Renaissance painting were identified and described. This demonstration of numerically aided phenomenological methods indicates the compatibility of rigorous and sensitive descriptions of experiential accounts. (shrink)

Dream-enacting behaviors are behavioral expressions of forceful dream images often occurring during sleep-to-wakefulness transitions. We propose that DEBs reflect brain activity underlying social cognition, in particular, motor-affective resonance generated by the mirror neuron system. We developed a Mirror Behavior Questionnaire to assess some dimensions of mirror behaviors and investigated relationships between MBQ scores and DEBs in a large of university undergraduate cohort. MBQ scores were normally distributed and described by a four-factor structure . DEB scores correlated positively with MBQ total (...) and factor scores even with social desirability, somnambulism and somniloquy controlled. Emotion-specific DEB items correlated with corresponding emotion-specific MBQ items, especially crying and smiling. Results provide preliminary evidence for cross-state relationships between propensities for dream-enacting and mirror behaviors—especially behaviors involving motor-affective resonance—and our suggestion that motor-affective resonance mediates dream-enactment imagery during sleep and emotional empathy during waking. (shrink)

The present study utilized research design in which six different poems were given repeated readings by groups of persons in which there were an equal number of males and females and of introverts and extraverts as assessed by the Myers- Briggs Type Indicator (Myers, 1962). Assessments of readers’ experience of the poem were obtained immediately after an initial reading and again after repeated readings of the poem. Subjects' general descriptions of their experience of the poems were reduced to fundamental descriptions (...) (Colaizzi, 1969) by a three-step procedure (preliminary listing, grouping, and constituent definition) and then resynthesized in a fourth step that placed the constituents into a coherent general description. As understanding increased, readers experience became less personal and more closely related to that intended by the poet. The general trend was increased imagery but attenuation of emotional experience as both were experienced as a part of or derived more directly from the poem itself. (shrink)

We previously reported that college students who indicated engaging in frequent dream-enacting behaviors also scored high on a new measure of mirror behaviors, which is the propensity to imitate another person’s emotions or actions. Since dream-enacting behaviors are frequently the culmination of nightmares, one explanation for the observed relationship is that individuals who frequently display mirror behaviors are also prone to nightmares. We used the Mirror Behavior Questionnaire and self-reported frequencies of nightmares to assess this possibility.A sample of 480 students, (...) consisting of 188 males and 292 females enrolled in a first-year university psychology course, participated for course credit. They completed a battery of questionnaires that included the 16-item MBQ, plus an item about nightmare frequency in the past 30 days. NMF scores were split to create low, medium, and high NMF groups.MBQ total scores were significantly higher for female than for male subjects, but an interaction revealed that this was true only for Hi-NMF subjects. MBQ Factor 4, Motor Skill Imitation, paralleled this global interaction for females, whereas MBQ Factor 3, Sleepiness/Anger Contagion, was elevated only for Hi-NMF males. Item analyses indicated that Hi- and Med-NMF females scored higher than Lo-NMF females on the 3 items of Factor 4 that reflect voluntary imitation , as well as on 2 other items that reflect involuntary imitation . Although Hi- and Lo-NMF males differed most clearly on the sleepiness item of Factor 3, all 3 items on this factor are plausibly associated with perception of and response to social threat.Results provide evidence that among females nightmares are associated with voluntary and involuntary mirror behaviors during wakefulness, while among males nightmares are associated with threat-related mirror behaviors during wakefulness. They thus support the possibility that the association between mirror behaviors and dream-enacting behaviors is due to a common mirror neuron mechanism that underlies mirror behaviors and nightmares and that involves motor, rather than emotional, resonance. These results have implications for understanding the comorbidity of nightmares and other pathological symptoms such as imitative suicidal behaviors, the influence of observational learning on dissociative symptomatology, and the predominance of threat and aggression in the dream enacting behaviors of REM sleep behavior disorder. (shrink)