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    Dream recall, alexithymia and depression.

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    The issue of a quantitative and qualitative impoverishment of dream mentation in alexithymic subjects has been shown and explained as a general difficulty of alexithymics in recalling their dreams [1]. On the other hand, this relationship disappears when the contribution of depression is considered (unpublished data). Hence, a multivariate design on a larger sample size has been carried out taking into account both alexithymia and depression as predictors of oneiric experience. A sample of 443 undergraduate students filled-in the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) and the CES-D (Center for Epidemiological Study Depression) scale. Then, 144 of them (mean age 23.13 ± 2.72; 22 M, 122 F) accepted to audio-record their dream reports for 14 consecutive days. The transcriptions of their dreams were considered with regard to their length and emotional content. Self-rates obtained by a dream diary were also considered to assess dream recall frequency, and their emotional valence, vividness and bizarreness. Results on dream diary measures indicated that the number of dreams and bizarreness were positively related to the CES-D scores, while vividness of dreams was negatively related to the TAS-20 scores. Analyses of dream report trascriptions indicated a coherent picture, with a positive relation between the depression scores and, respectively, the number and the lenght of dreams (as expressed by the Total Word Count), while a negative relation was found with emotional valence. The present results suggest that different subjective and objective features of sleep mentation are correlated to depression or alexithymia. Hence, these constructs, although highly inter-correlated, keep an independent capability to explain different sleep mentation features. On the other hand, the issue of a dreaming impoverishment in alexithymia needs to be reconsidered, since all the quantitative measures correlate only with the depression scores. Different quantitative and qualitative features of dreaming are related to depression or alexithymia

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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