TV, video games not related to nightmares: study
Shannon Proudfoot , Canwest News Service
Published: Monday, July 28, 2008Television and computer games aren't to blame for dark dreams about things that go bump in the night, according to a new study that finds no link between children's viewing or gaming habits and their nightmares.
The research debunks popular wisdom as well as previous studies in which parents and children reported that frightening dreams were triggered by TV programs.
"We found no correlation between the amount of TV watching and computer game playing and nightmare frequency," says Michael Schredl, head of research for the Sleep Laboratory at Germany's Central Institute of Mental Health.
He and his team asked 250 students aged nine to 13 to log the number of hours they spent every day for a week on activities such as watching TV, playing computer games, reading or playing sports, and to list the programs they watched. They were also asked whether they remembered a dream from the previous night and what it was about.
The researchers were surprised to find there was no connection between nightmares and computer games or TV shows - including the police and crime shows that 14 per cent of the children said they watched regularly.
They did find a connection between reading and nightmares, but the paper, in the current issue of the journal Dreaming, cautions that the number of children affected is too small to draw definitive conclusions.
"It might make sense that not only the pictures themselves are of importance, but what children fantasize during the day," Schredl says of the potential connection between books and nightmares. "They might be more stimulated by reading than by watching TV."
Forty-six per cent of the children in the study said they didn't have any nightmares in the previous few months, while 38 per cent reported occasional bad dreams. Sixteen per cent were plagued by nightmares at least once a week. There's no reason to think the results would not apply to Canadian children as they did to Germans, he says.
Girls were significantly more likely to have nightmares than boys, the researchers found, possibly because they recall more of their dreams. It's a trend that's been echoed in studies of young adults, Schredl says, and the causes are still unclear.
And the stuff of nightmares has shifted over time, he says. Bad dreams starring the bogeyman were most common in the 1920s, he found in reviews of previous research, but that shifted to ghosts, witches and devils in the 1950s. By the 1990s, nightmares were most often populated by Hollywood horrors, he found - making the findings of this latest study dismissing the effects of TV all the more surprising.
"We found in our studies that film characters play a role in the content of nightmares," he says.
http://www.canada.com/topics/technology/games/story.html?id=561eec07-234a-44db-9fea-88fd5dabb323
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