Images are visual representations that can be two-dimensional , such as a drawing , painting , or photograph , or three-dimensional , such as a carving or sculpture . Images may be displayed through other media, including a projection on a surface, the activation of electronic signals, or digital displays ; they can also be reproduced through mechanical means, such as photography , printmaking , or photocopying . Images can also be animated through digital or physical processes.
125-498: A dream is a succession of images , ideas , emotions , and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep . Humans spend about two hours dreaming per night, and each dream lasts around 5–20 minutes, although the dreamer may perceive the dream as being much longer than this. The content and function of dreams have been topics of scientific, philosophical and religious interest throughout recorded history . Dream interpretation , practiced by
250-463: A graph or function or an imaginary entity. For a mental image to be understood outside of an individual's mind, however, there must be a way of conveying that mental image through the words or visual productions of the subject. The broader sense of the word 'image' also encompasses any two-dimensional figure, such as a map , graph , pie chart , painting , or banner . In this wider sense, images can also be rendered manually, such as by drawing ,
375-476: A "cult" value as an example of artistic beauty. Following years of various reproductions of the painting, the portrait's "cult" status has little to do with its original subject or the artistry. It has become famous for being famous, while at the same time, its recognizability has made it a subject to be copied, manipulated, satirized, or otherwise altered in forms ranging from Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q . to Andy Warhol 's multiple silk-screened reproductions of
500-492: A "quasi-therapeutic" function, enabling the dreamer to process trauma in a safe place. Revonsuo's 2000 threat simulation hypothesis, whose premise is that during much of human evolution, physical and interpersonal threats were serious, giving reproductive advantage to those who survived them. Dreaming aided survival by replicating these threats and providing the dreamer with practice in dealing with them. In 2015, Revonsuo proposed social simulation theory, which describes dreams as
625-436: A (usually) male viewer. The documentary film scholar Bill Nichols has also studied how apparently "objective" photographs and films still encode assumptions about their subjects. Images perpetuated in public education, media, and popular culture have a profound impact on the formation of such mental images: What makes them so powerful is that they circumvent the faculties of the conscious mind but, instead, directly target
750-551: A 10-item negative affect scale. The PANAS-X is an expanded version of PANAS that incorporates negative affect subscales for Fear, Sadness, Guilt, Hostility, and Shyness. I-PANAS-SF – The International Positive and Negative Affect Schedule Short Form is an extensively validated brief, cross-culturally reliable 10-item version of the PANAS. Negative Affect items are Afraid, Ashamed, Hostile, Nervous and Upset. Internal consistency reliabilities between .72 and .76 are reported. The I-PANAS-SF
875-465: A 3-dimensional object with less effort; the advent and development of " 3-D printing " has expanded that capability. "Moving" two-dimensional images are actually illusions of movement perceived when still images are displayed in sequence, each image lasting less, and sometimes much less, than a fraction of a second. The traditional standard for the display of individual frames by a motion picture projector has been 24 frames per second (FPS) since at least
1000-473: A beneficial role in increasing skepticism and decreasing gullibility. Because negative affective states increase external analysis and attention to details, people in negative states are better able to detect deception. Researchers have presented findings in which students in negative affective states had improved lie detection compared to students in positive affective states. In a study, students watched video clips of everyday people either lying or telling
1125-421: A better quality descriptions and greater amount of information and details. These results show that negative mood can improve people's communication skills. A negative mood is closely linked to better conversation because it makes use of the hippocampus and different regions of the brain. When someone is upset, that individual may see or hear things differently than an individual who is very upbeat and happy all
1250-442: A certain situation. They will jump right to their current mood when asked a question. However, some mistake this process when using their current mood to justify a reaction to a stimulus. If they are only a little sad, their reactions and input may be negative as a whole. First impressions are one of the most basic forms of judgments people make on a daily basis; yet judgment formation is a complex and fallible process. Negative affect
1375-471: A coding system to study 1,000 dream reports from college students. Results indicated that participants from varying parts of the world demonstrated similarity in their dream content. The only residue of antiquity's authoritative dream figure in the Hall and Van de Castle listing of dream characters is the inclusion of God in the category of prominent persons. Hall's complete dream reports were made publicly available in
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#17328440297811500-849: A departure from earlier psychological research, which was characterized by a unilateral emphasis on the benefits of positive affect . Both states of affect influence mental processes and behavior. Benefits of negative affect are present in areas of cognition including perception , judgement , memory and interpersonal personal relations. Since negative affect relies more on cautious processing than preexisting knowledge, people with negative affect tend to perform better in instances involving deception , manipulation, impression formation , and stereotyping . Negative affectivity's analytical and detailed processing of information leads to fewer reconstructive-memory errors, whereas positive mood relies on broader schematic to thematic information that ignores detail. Thus, information processing in negative moods reduces
1625-410: A diary. This prevented the selective memory effect, and the dreams no longer seemed accurate about the future. Another experiment gave subjects a fake diary of a student with apparently precognitive dreams. This diary described events from the person's life, as well as some predictive dreams and some non-predictive dreams. When subjects were asked to recall the dreams they had read, they remembered more of
1750-458: A different view of the world and what goes on in it, thus making their conversations different and interesting to others. Results of one study show that participants with negative affectivity were more careful with the information they shared with others, being more cautious with who they could trust or not. Researchers found that negative mood not only decreases intimacy levels but also increases caution in placing trust in others. Negative affect
1875-672: A divine revelation. For example, the Hebrew prophet Samuel would "lie down and sleep in the temple at Shiloh before the Ark and receive the word of the Lord", and Joseph interpreted a Pharaoh's dream of seven lean cows swallowing seven fat cows as meaning the subsequent seven years would be bountiful, followed by seven years of famine. Most of the dreams in the Bible are in the Book of Genesis . Christians mostly shared
2000-426: A dream is one of three states that the soul experiences during its lifetime, the other two states being the waking state and the sleep state. The earliest Upanishads , written before 300 BCE, emphasize two meanings of dreams. The first says that dreams are merely expressions of inner desires. The second is the belief of the soul leaving the body and being guided until awakened. In Judaism, dreams are considered part of
2125-512: A dream of a dim star high in the night sky indicated problems in the head region, while low in the night sky indicated bowel issues. Greek philosopher Plato (427-347) wrote that people harbor secret, repressed desires, such as incest, murder, adultery, and conquest, which build up during the day and run rampant during the night in dreams. Plato's student, Aristotle (384–322 BCE), believed dreams were caused by processing incomplete physiological activity during sleep, such as eyes trying to see while
2250-451: A form of record-keeping; as an element of spiritual, religious, or magical practice; or even as a form of communication. Early writing systems , including hieroglyphics , ideographic writing, and even the Roman alphabet , owe their origins in some respects to pictorial representations. Images of any type may convey different meanings and sensations for individual viewers, regardless of whether
2375-501: A greater amount of false memories. This implies that positive affect promotes integration of misleading details and negative affect reduces the misinformation effect. People who experience negative affectivity following an event report fewer reconstructive false memories. This was evidenced by two studies conducted around public events. The first surrounded the events of the televised O.J. Simpson trial. Participants were asked to fill out questionnaires three times: one week, two months and
2500-514: A gun. Some of the targets wore turbans making them appear Muslim. As expected, there was a significant bias against Muslim targets resulting in a tendency to shoot at them. However, this tendency decreased with subjects in negative affective states. Positive affect groups developed more aggressive tendencies toward Muslims. Researchers concluded that negative affect leads to less reliance on internal stereotypes, thus decreasing judgmental bias. Multiple studies have shown that negative affectivity has
2625-423: A halo effect in identifying a middle-aged man as more likely to be a philosopher than an unconventional, young woman. These halo effects were nearly eliminated when participants were in a negative affective state. In the study, researchers sorted participants into either happy or sad groups using an autobiographical mood induction task in which participants reminisced on sad or happy memories. Then, participants read
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#17328440297812750-407: A highly controversial topic. Participants were informed that the debater was assigned a stance to take in the essay that did not necessarily reflect his views. Still, the positive affect groups rated debaters who argued unpopular views as holding the same attitude expressed in the essay. They were also rated as unlikeable compared to debaters with popular stances, thus, demonstrating FAE. In contrast,
2875-404: A mood induction process. After the mood induction process, participants were required to watch a show with positive and negative elements. After watching the show, they were asked to engage on a hypothetical conversation in which they "describe the episode (they) just observed to a friend". Their speech was recorded and transcribed during this task. Results showed that speakers in a negative mood had
3000-510: A negative person or depressed. They are going through a normal process and are feeling something that many individuals may not be able to feel or process due to differing problems. These findings complement evolutionary psychology theories that affective states serve adaptive functions in promoting suitable cognitive strategies to deal with environmental challenges. Positive affect is associated with assimilative, top-down processing used in response to familiar, benign environments. Negative affect
3125-499: A number of works by Philip K. Dick , such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik . Similar themes were explored by Jorge Luis Borges , for instance in The Circular Ruins . Image In the context of signal processing , an image is a distributed amplitude of color(s). In optics , the term "image" (or "optical image") refers specifically to the reproduction of an object formed by light waves coming from
3250-618: A person to be more polite and elaborate when making requests. Negative affectivity increases the accuracy of social perceptions and inferences. Specifically, high negative-affectivity people have more negative, but accurate, perceptions of the impression they make to others. People with low negative affectivity form overly-positive, potentially inaccurate impression of others that can lead to misplaced trust. A research conducted by Forgas J.P studied how affectivity can influence intergroup discrimination. He measured affectivity by how people allocate rewards to in-group and out-group members. In
3375-496: A person's memories and experiences, but conversation can take on highly exaggerated and bizarre forms. Some dreams may even tell elaborate stories wherein the dreamer enters entirely new, complex worlds and awakes with ideas, thoughts and feelings never experienced prior to the dream. People who are blind from birth do not have visual dreams. Their dream contents are related to other senses, such as hearing , touch , smell , and taste , whichever are present since birth. Dream study
3500-411: A philosophical essay by a fake academic who was identified as either a middle-aged, bespectacled man or as a young, unorthodox-looking woman. The fake writer was evaluated on intelligence and competence. The positive affect group exhibited a strong halo effect, rating the male writer significantly higher than the female writer in competence. The negative affect group exhibited almost no halo effects rating
3625-572: A physician from Hamburg, was the first who suggested that dreams are a need and that they have the function to erase (a) sensory impressions that were not fully worked up, and (b) ideas that were not fully developed during the day. In dreams, incomplete material is either removed (suppressed) or deepened and included into memory. Freud , whose dream studies focused on interpreting dreams, not explaining how or why humans dream, disputed Robert's hypothesis and proposed that dreams preserve sleep by representing as fulfilled those wishes that otherwise would awaken
3750-401: A physiological effect of light impressions remaining on the retina of the eye for very brief periods. Even though the term is still sometimes used in popular discussions of movies, it is not a scientifically valid explanation. Other terms emphasize the complex cognitive operations of the brain and the human visual system. " Flicker fusion ", the " phi phenomenon ", and " beta movement " are among
3875-441: A positive dream about a friend to be meaningful than a positive dream about someone they disliked, for example, and were more likely to view a negative dream about a person they disliked as meaningful than a negative dream about a person they liked. According to surveys, it is common for people to feel their dreams are predicting subsequent life events. Psychologists have explained these experiences in terms of memory biases , namely
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4000-515: A result of observation of his dreams. Ignorant as he was, he could have come to no other conclusion but that, in dreams, he left his sleeping body in one universe and went wandering off into another. It is considered that, but for that savage, the idea of such a thing as a 'soul' would never have even occurred to mankind.... In the Mandukya Upanishad , part of the Veda scriptures of Indian Hinduism ,
4125-572: A rite of passage, fasting and praying until an anticipated guiding dream was received, to be shared with the rest of the tribe upon their return. Beginning in the late 19th century, Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud , founder of psychoanalysis , theorized that dreams reflect the dreamer's unconscious mind and specifically that dream content is shaped by unconscious wish fulfillment. He argued that important unconscious desires often relate to early childhood memories and experiences. Carl Jung and others expanded on Freud's idea that dream content reflects
4250-462: A selective memory for accurate predictions and distorted memory so that dreams are retrospectively fitted onto life experiences. The multi-faceted nature of dreams makes it easy to find connections between dream content and real events. The term "veridical dream" has been used to indicate dreams that reveal or contain truths not yet known to the dreamer, whether future events or secrets. In one experiment, subjects were asked to write down their dreams in
4375-522: A simulation for training social skills and bonds. Eagleman's and Vaughn's 2021 defensive activation theory, which says that, given the brain's neuroplasticity , dreams evolved as a visual hallucinatory activity during sleep's extended periods of darkness, busying the occipital lobe and thereby protecting it from possible appropriation by other, non-vision, sense operations. Erik Hoel proposes, based on artificial neural networks, that dreams prevent overfitting to past experiences; that is, they enable
4500-589: A variety of aspects of the world around them in generally negative terms. Negative affectivity is strongly related to life satisfaction . Individuals high in negative affect will exhibit, on average, higher levels of distress, anxiety, and dissatisfaction, and tend to focus on the unpleasant aspects of themselves, the world, the future, and other people, and also evoke more negative life events. The similarities between these affective traits and life satisfaction have led some researchers to view both positive and negative affect with life satisfaction as specific indicators of
4625-407: A video that induced either negative emotion or a neutral mood. The two videos were deliberately similar except for the action of interest, which was either a mugging (negative emotion) or a conversation (neutral emotion). After watching one of the two videos participants are shown perpetrator lineups, which either contained the target perpetrator from the video or a foil, a person that looked similar to
4750-425: A witness's memory. This corresponds to two types of memory failure: Negative mood is shown to decrease suggestibility error. This is seen through reduced amounts of incorporation of false memories when misleading information is present. On the other hand, positive affect has shown to increase susceptibility to misleading information. An experiment with undergraduate students supported these results. Participants began
4875-401: A year after the televised verdict. These questionnaires measured participant emotion towards the verdict and the accuracy of their recalled memory of what occurred during the trial. Overall the study found that although participant response to the event outcome did not affect the quantity of remembered information, it did influence the likelihood of false memory. Participants who were pleased with
5000-402: Is a single static image. This phrase is used in photography, visual media , and the computer industry to emphasize that one is not talking about movies, or in very precise or pedantic technical writing such as a standard . A moving image is typically a movie ( film ) or video , including digital video . It could also be an animated display , such as a zoetrope . A still frame
5125-404: Is a still image derived from one frame of a moving one. In contrast, a film still is a photograph taken on the set of a movie or television program during production, used for promotional purposes. In image processing , a picture function is a mathematical representation of a two-dimensional image as a function of two spatial variables . The function f(x,y) describes the intensity of
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5250-559: Is connected with positive affect since it occurs when people use top-down cognitive processing based on inferences. Negative affect stimulates bottom-up, systematic analysis that reduces fundamental attribution error. This effect is documented in FAE research in which students evaluated a fake debater on attitude and likability based on an essay the "debater" wrote. After being sorted into positive or negative affect groups, participants read one of two possible essays arguing for one side or another on
5375-504: Is freed from the body during slumber to journey in a dream realm, while the other remained in the body. This belief and dream interpretation had been questioned since early times, such as by the philosopher Wang Chong (27–97 CE ). The Babylonians and Assyrians divided dreams into "good," which were sent by the gods, and "bad," sent by demons. A surviving collection of dream omens entitled Iškar Zaqīqu records various dream scenarios as well as prognostications of what will happen to
5500-412: Is high and resembles that of being awake. Because REM sleep is detectable in many species, and because research suggests that all mammals experience REM, linking dreams to REM sleep has led to conjectures that animals dream. However, humans dream during non-REM sleep, also, and not all REM awakenings elicit dream reports. To be studied, a dream must first be reduced to a verbal report, which is an account of
5625-510: Is improved in areas such as impression formation , reducing fundamental attribution error , stereotyping , and gullibility . While sadness is normally associated with the hippocampus, it does not produce the same side effects that would be associated with feelings of pleasure or excitement. Sadness correlates with feeling blue or the creation of tears, while excitement may cause a spike in blood pressure and one's pulse. As far as judgment goes, most people think about how they themselves feel about
5750-413: Is often associated with team selection. It is viewed as a trait that could make selecting individuals for a team irrelevant, thus preventing knowledge from becoming known or predicted for current issues that may arise. Negative affectivity subconsciously signals a challenging social environment. Negative mood may increase a tendency to conform to social norms. In a study, college students were exposed to
5875-506: Is popular with scientists exploring the mind–brain problem . Some "propose to reduce aspects of dream phenomenology to neurobiology." But current science cannot specify dream physiology in detail. Protocols in most nations restrict human brain research to non-invasive procedures. In the United States, invasive brain procedures with a human subject are allowed only when these are deemed necessary in surgical treatment to address medical needs of
6000-407: Is regularly recognized as a "stable, heritable trait tendency to experience a broad range of negative feelings, such as worry, anxiety, self-criticisms, and a negative self-view". This allows one to feel every type of emotion, which is regarded as a normal part of life and human nature. So, while the emotions themselves are viewed as negative, the individual experiencing them should not be classified as
6125-486: Is shown to decrease errors in forming impressions based on presuppositions. One common judgment error is the halo effect , or the tendency to form unfounded impressions of people based on known but irrelevant information. For instance, more attractive people are often attributed with more positive qualities. Research demonstrates that positive affect tends to increase the halo effect, whereas negative affect decreases it. A study involving undergraduate students demonstrated
6250-401: Is still an image, even though it does not fully use the visual system's capabilities. On the other hand, some processes can be used to create visual representations of objects that are otherwise inaccessible to the human visual system. These include microscopy for the magnification of minute objects, telescopes that can observe objects at great distances, X-rays that can visually represent
6375-458: Is the true dream (al-ru’ya), then the false dream, which may come from the devil ( shaytan ), and finally, the meaningless everyday dream (hulm). This last dream could be brought forth by the dreamer's ego or base appetite based on what they experienced in the real world. The true dream is often indicated by Islam's hadith tradition. In one narration by Aisha , the wife of the Prophet, it is said that
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#17328440297816500-461: The Babylonians in the third millennium BCE and even earlier by the ancient Sumerians , figures prominently in religious texts in several traditions, and has played a lead role in psychotherapy. The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology . Most modern dream study focuses on the neurophysiology of dreams and on proposing and testing hypotheses regarding dream function. It is not known where in
6625-564: The Society for Neuroscience , "Because no adequate alternatives exist, much of this research must [sic] be done on animal subjects." However, since animal dreaming can be only inferred, not confirmed, animal studies yield no hard facts to illuminate the neurophysiology of dreams. Examining human subjects with brain lesions can provide clues, but the lesion method cannot discriminate between the effects of destruction and disconnection and cannot target specific neuronal groups in heterogeneous regions like
6750-789: The battle of the Milvian Bridge if he adopted the Chi-Rho as his battle standard ." In Buddhism, ideas about dreams are similar to the classical and folk traditions in South Asia. The same dream is sometimes experienced by multiple people, as in the case of the Buddha-to-be , before he is leaving his home . It is described in the Mahāvastu that several of the Buddha's relatives had premonitory dreams preceding this. Some dreams are also seen to transcend time:
6875-474: The misinformation effect and increases overall accuracy of details. People also exhibit less interfering responses to stimuli when given descriptions or performing any cognitive task. People are notoriously susceptible to forming inaccurate judgments based on biases and limited information. Evolutionary theories propose that negative affective states tend to increase skepticism and decrease reliance on preexisting knowledge. Consequently, judgmental accuracy
7000-478: The Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Benjamin argues that the mechanical reproduction of images, which had accelerated through photographic processes in the previous one hundred years or so, inevitably degrades the "authenticity" or quasi-religious "aura" of the original object. One example is Leonardo da Vinci 's Mona Lisa , originally painted as a portrait, but much later, with its display as an art object, it developed
7125-640: The Buddha-to-be has certain dreams that are the same as those of previous Buddhas , the Lalitavistara states. In Buddhist literature, dreams often function as a "signpost" motif to mark certain stages in the life of the main character. Buddhist views about dreams are expressed in the Pāli Commentaries and the Milinda Pañhā . In Chinese history, people wrote of two vital aspects of the soul of which one
7250-505: The Greek philosopher Plato described our apparent reality as a copy of a higher order of universal forms . As copies of a higher reality, the things we perceive in the world, tangible or abstract, are inevitably imperfect. Book 7 of The Republic offers Plato's " Allegory of the Cave ," where ordinary human life is compared to being a prisoner in a darkened cave who believes that shadows projected onto
7375-722: The Looking-Glass . Unlike many dream worlds, Carroll's logic is like that of actual dreams, with transitions and flexible causality. Other fictional dream worlds include the Dreamlands of H. P. Lovecraft 's Dream Cycle and The Neverending Story ' s world of Fantastica, which includes places like the Desert of Lost Dreams, the Sea of Possibilities and the Swamps of Sadness. Dreamworlds, shared hallucinations and other alternate realities feature in
7500-494: The Prophet's dreams would come true like the ocean's waves. Just as in its predecessors, the Quran also recounts the story of Joseph and his unique ability to interpret dreams. In both Christianity and Islam dreams feature in conversion stories. According to ancient authors, Constantine the Great started his conversion to Christianity because he had a dream which prophesied that he would win
7625-643: The Red Sox fans. The results from both of these experiments are consistent with the findings that negative emotion can lead to fewer memory errors and thus increased memory accuracy of events. Although negative affect has been shown to decrease the misinformation effect, the degree to which memory is improved is not enough to make a significant effect on witness testimony. In fact, emotions, including negative affect, are shown to reduce accuracy in identifying perpetrators from photographic lineups. Researchers demonstrated this effect in an experiment in which participants watched
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#17328440297817750-483: The Solms 2000 paper that certified the separability of REM sleep and dream phenomena, many studies purporting to uncover the function of dreams have in fact been studying not dreams but measurable REM sleep. Theories of dream function since the identification of REM sleep include: Hobson's and McCarley's 1977 activation-synthesis hypothesis , which proposed "a functional role for dreaming sleep in promoting some aspect of
7875-545: The accuracy of recalled memories. This has been especially pragmatic in criminal settings as eyewitness memories have been found to be less reliable than one would hope. However, the externally focused and accommodative processing of negative affect has a positive effect on the overall improvement of memory. This is evidenced by reduction of the misinformation effect, and the number of false memories reported. The knowledge implies that negative affect can be used to enhance eyewitness memory; however, additional research suggests that
8000-562: The art of painting, or the graphic arts (such as lithography or etching ). Additionally, images can be rendered automatically through printing , computer graphics technology, or a combination of both methods. A two-dimensional image does not need to use the entire visual system to be a visual representation. An example of this is a grayscale ("black and white") image, which uses the visual system's sensitivity to brightness across all wavelengths without taking into account different colors. A black-and-white visual representation of something
8125-577: The beliefs of the Hebrews and thought that dreams were of a supernatural character because the Old Testament includes frequent stories of dreams with divine inspiration. The most famous of these dream stories was Jacob's dream of a ladder that stretches from Earth to Heaven . Many Christians preach that God can speak to people through their dreams. The famous glossary, the Somniale Danielis , written in
8250-432: The best way to receive divine revelation, and thus they would induce (or "incubate") dreams. They went to sanctuaries and slept on special "dream beds" in hope of receiving advice, comfort, or healing from the gods. From a Darwinian perspective dreams would have to fulfill some kind of biological requirement, provide some benefit for natural selection to take place, or at least have no negative impact on fitness. Robert (1886),
8375-409: The brain dreams originate, if there is a single origin for dreams or if multiple regions of the brain are involved, or what the purpose of dreaming is for the body or mind. The human dream experience and what to make of it has undergone sizable shifts over the course of history. Long ago, according to writings from Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt , dreams dictated post-dream behaviors to an extent that
8500-445: The brain involves significant neural activity downstream from eye intake, and it is theorized that "the visual imagery of dreams is produced by activation during sleep of the same structures that generate complex visual imagery in waking perception." Dreams present a running narrative rather than exclusively visual imagery. Following their work with split-brain subjects, Gazzaniga and LeDoux postulated, without attempting to specify
8625-465: The brain stem. Denied precision tools and obliged to depend on imaging, much dream research has succumbed to the law of the instrument . Studies detect an increase of blood flow in a specific brain region and then credit that region with a role in generating dreams. But pooling study results has led to the newer conclusion that dreaming involves large numbers of regions and pathways, which likely are different for different dream events. Image creation in
8750-644: The brain's effort to make sense of sparse and distorted information.... The cortex combines this haphazard input with whatever other activity was already occurring and does its best to synthesize a story that makes sense of the information." Neuroscientist Indre Viskontas is even more blunt, calling often bizarre dream content "just the result of your interpreter trying to create a story out of random neural signaling." For many humans across multiple eras and cultures, dreams are believed to have functioned as revealers of truths sourced during sleep from gods or other external entities. Ancient Egyptians believed that dreams were
8875-617: The broader construct of subjective well-being . Negative affect arousal mechanisms can induce negative affective states as evidenced by a study conducted by Stanley S. Seidner on negative arousal and white noise. The study quantified reactions from Mexican and Puerto Rican participants in response to the devaluation of speakers from other ethnic origins. There are many instruments that can be used to measure negative affectivity, including measures of related concepts, such as neuroticism and trait anxiety. Two frequently used are: PANAS – The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule incorporates
9000-498: The cave's wall comprise actual reality. Since art is itself an imitation, it is a copy of that copy and all the more imperfect. Artistic images, then, not only misdirect human reason away from understanding the higher forms of true reality, but in imitating the bad behaviors of humans in depictions of the gods, they can corrupt individuals and society. Echoes of such criticism have persisted across time, accelerating as image-making technologies have developed and expanded immensely since
9125-399: The commercial introduction of "talking pictures" in the late 1920s, which necessitated a standard for synchronizing images and sounds. Even in electronic formats such as television and digital image displays, the apparent "motion" is actually the result of many individual lines giving the impression of continuous movement. This phenomenon has often been described as " persistence of vision ":
9250-401: The data for the negative affect group displayed no significant difference in ratings for debaters with popular stance and debaters with unpopular stances. These results indicate that positive affect assimilation styles promote fundamental attribution error, and negative affect accommodation styles minimize the error in respect to judging people. Negative affect benefits judgment in diminishing
9375-821: The dominant personality factor of anxiety / neuroticism that is found within the Big Five personality traits as emotional stability. The Big Five are characterized as openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Neuroticism can plague an individual with severe mood swings, frequent sadness, worry, and being easily disturbed, and predicts the development and onset of all "common" mental disorders . Research shows that negative affectivity relates to different classes of variables: Self-reported stress and (poor) coping skills, health complaints, and frequency of unpleasant events. Weight gain and mental health complaints are often experienced as well. People who express high negative affectivity view themselves and
9500-399: The dreamer to learn from novel situations. Dreams figure prominently in major world religions. The dream experience for early humans, according to one interpretation, gave rise to the notion of a human " soul ," a central element in much religious thought. J. W. Dunne wrote: But there can be no reasonable doubt that the idea of a soul must have first arisen in the mind of primitive man as
9625-500: The dreamer's unconscious desires. Dream interpretation can be a result of subjective ideas and experiences. One study found that most people believe that "their dreams reveal meaningful hidden truths". The researchers surveyed students in the United States, South Korea, and India, and found that 74% of Indians, 65% of South Koreans and 56% of Americans believed their dream content provided them with meaningful insight into their unconscious beliefs and desires. This Freudian view of dreaming
9750-516: The dreamer. Freud wrote that dreams "serve the purpose of prolonging sleep instead of waking up. Dreams are the GUARDIANS of sleep and not its disturbers. " A turning point in theorizing about dream function came in 1953, when Science published the Aserinsky and Kleitman paper establishing REM sleep as a distinct phase of sleep and linking dreams to REM sleep. Until and even after publication of
9875-435: The dreamers, where they entered through a keyhole, exiting the same way after the divine message was given. Antiphon wrote the first known Greek book on dreams in the 5th century BCE. In that century, other cultures influenced Greeks to develop the belief that souls left the sleeping body. The father of modern medicine, Hippocrates (460–375 BCE ), thought dreams could analyze illness and predict diseases. For instance,
10000-468: The experience of negative emotions and poor self-concept . Negative affectivity subsumes a variety of negative emotions, including anger , contempt , disgust , guilt , fear , and nervousness . Low negative affectivity is characterized by frequent states of calmness and serenity, along with states of confidence , activeness, and great enthusiasm. Individuals differ in negative emotional reactivity. Trait negative affectivity roughly corresponds to
10125-548: The experience of the world that can be interpreted and from which lessons can be garnered. It is discussed in the Talmud, Tractate Berachot 55–60. The ancient Hebrews connected their dreams heavily with their religion, though the Hebrews were monotheistic and believed that dreams were the voice of one God alone. Hebrews also differentiated between good dreams (from God) and bad dreams (from evil spirits). The Hebrews, like many other ancient cultures, incubated dreams in order to receive
10250-452: The extent to which memory is improved by negative affect does not sufficiently improve eyewitness testimonies to significantly reduce its error. Negative affect has been shown to decrease susceptibility of incorporating misleading information, which is related to the misinformation effect. The misinformation effect refers to the finding that misleading information presented between the encoding of an event and its subsequent recall influences
10375-488: The form of idols . In recent years, militant extremist groups such as the Taliban and ISIS have destroyed centuries-old artifacts, especially those associated with other religions. Virtually all cultures have produced images and applied different meanings or applications to them. The loss of knowledge about the context and connection of an image to its object is likely to result in different perceptions and interpretations of
10500-461: The illusion of depth in an otherwise "flat" image, but "3-D photography" ( stereoscopy ) or " 3-D film " are optical illusions that require special devices such as eyeglasses to create the illusion of depth. Copies of 3-dimensional images have traditionally had to be crafted one at a time, usually by an individual or team of artisans . In the modern age, the development of plastics and other technologies made it possible to create multiple copies of
10625-529: The image and even of the original object itself. Through human history, one dominant form of imagery has been in relation to religion and spirituality. Such images, whether in the form of idols that are objects of worship or that represent some other spiritual state or quality, have a different status as artifacts when copies of such images sever links to the spiritual or supernatural. The German philosopher and essayist Walter Benjamin brought particular attention to this point in his 1935 essay "The Work of Art in
10750-471: The image's creator intended them. An image may be taken simply as a more or less "accurate" copy of a person, place, thing, or event. It may represent an abstract concept, such as the political power of a ruler or ruling class, a practical or moral lesson, an object for spiritual or religious veneration, or an object—human or otherwise—to be desired. It may also be regarded for its purely aesthetic qualities, rarity, or monetary value. Such reactions can depend on
10875-503: The image. In modern times, the development of " non-fungible tokens " (NFTs) has been touted as an attempt to create "authentic" or "unique" images that have a monetary value, existing only in digital format. This assumption has been widely debated. The development of synthetic acoustic technologies and the creation of sound art have led to considering the possibilities of a sound-image made up of irreducible phonic substance beyond linguistic or musicological analysis. A still image
11000-399: The implicit use of stereotypes by promoting closer attention to stimuli. In one study, participants were less likely to discriminate against targets that appeared Muslim when in a negative affective state. After organizing participants into positive and negative affect groups, researchers had them play a computer game. Participants had to make rapid decisions to shoot only at targets carrying
11125-635: The interior structures of the human body (among other objects), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) , positron emission tomography (PET scans) , and others. Such processes often rely on detecting electromagnetic radiation that occurs beyond the light spectrum visible to the human eye and converting such signals into recognizable images. Aside from sculpture and other physical activities that can create three-dimensional images from solid material, some modern techniques, such as holography , can create three-dimensional images that are reproducible but intangible to human touch. Some photographic processes can now render
11250-405: The invention of the daguerreotype and other photographic processes in the mid-19th century. By the late 20th century, works like John Berger's Ways of Seeing and Susan Sontag 's On Photography questioned the hidden assumptions of power, race, sex, and class encoded in even realistic images, and how those assumptions and such images may implicate the viewer in the voyeuristic position of
11375-610: The king of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash (reigned c. 2144–2124 BCE), rebuilt the temple of Ningirsu as the result of a dream in which he was told to do so. After antiquity, the passive hearing of visitation dreams largely gave way to visualized narratives in which the dreamer becomes a character who actively participates. From the 1940s to 1985, Calvin S. Hall collected more than 50,000 dream reports at Western Reserve University . In 1966, Hall and Robert Van de Castle published The Content Analysis of Dreams , in which they outlined
11500-435: The learning process...." In 2010 a Harvard study was published showing experimental evidence that dreams were correlated with improved learning. Crick's and Mitchison's 1983 " reverse learning " theory, which states that dreams are like the cleaning-up operations of computers when they are offline, removing (suppressing) parasitic nodes and other "junk" from the mind during sleep. Hartmann's 1995 proposal that dreams serve
11625-686: The making of images, even though the extent of that proscription has varied with time, place, and sect or denomination of a given religion. In Judaism, one of the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai forbids the making of "any graven image, or any likeness [of any thing] that [is] in heaven above, or that [is] in the earth beneath, or that [is] in the water under earth." In Christian history, periods of iconoclasm (the destruction of images, especially those with religious meanings or connotations) have broken out from time to time, and some sects and denominations have rejected or severely limited
11750-456: The mid-1990s by his protégé William Domhoff . More recent studies of dream reports, while providing more detail, continue to cite the Hall study favorably. In the Hall study, the most common emotion experienced in dreams was anxiety . Other emotions included abandonment , anger , fear , joy , and happiness . Negative emotions were much more common than positive ones. The Hall data analysis showed that sexual dreams occur no more than 10% of
11875-512: The name of Daniel , attempted to teach Christian populations to interpret their dreams. Iain R. Edgar has researched the role of dreams in Islam . He has argued that dreams play an important role in the history of Islam and the lives of Muslims, since dream interpretation is the only way that Muslims can receive revelations from God since the death of the last prophet, Muhammad . According to Edgar, Islam classifies three types of dreams. Firstly, there
12000-581: The narrative; The Book of the Duchess and The Vision Concerning Piers Plowman are two such dream visions . Even before them, in antiquity, the same device had been used by Cicero and Lucian of Samosata . Dreams have also featured in fantasy and speculative fiction since the 19th century. One of the best-known dream worlds is Wonderland from Lewis Carroll 's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , as well as Looking-Glass Land from its sequel, Through
12125-410: The neural mechanisms, a " left-brain interpreter " that seeks to create a plausible narrative from whatever electro-chemical signals reach the brain's left hemisphere. Sleep research has determined that some brain regions fully active during waking are, during REM sleep, activated only in a partial or fragmentary way. Drawing on this knowledge, textbook author James W. Kalat explains, "[A] dream represents
12250-433: The night before flying (while awake), and that they would be as likely to miss their flight if they dreamt of their plane crashing the night before their flight as if there was an actual plane crash on the route they intended to take. Participants in the study were more likely to perceive dreams to be meaningful when the content of dreams was in accordance with their beliefs and desires while awake. They were more likely to view
12375-519: The object. A volatile image exists or is perceived only for a short period. This may be a reflection of an object by a mirror, a projection of a camera obscura , or a scene displayed on a cathode-ray tube . A fixed image , also called a hard copy , is one that has been recorded on a material object, such as paper or textile . A mental image exists in an individual's mind as something one remembers or imagines. The subject of an image does not need to be real; it may be an abstract concept such as
12500-503: The participants received questions with misleading information and the other half received questions without any misleading information. This manipulation was used to determine if participants were susceptible to suggestibility failure. After 45 minutes of unrelated distractors participants were given a set of true or false questions which tested for false memories. Participants experiencing negative moods reported fewer numbers of false memories, whereas those experiencing positive moods reported
12625-572: The person who experiences each dream, apparently based on previous cases. Some list different possible outcomes, based on occasions in which people experienced similar dreams with different results. The Greeks shared their beliefs with the Egyptians on how to interpret good and bad dreams, and the idea of incubating dreams. Morpheus , the Greek god of dreams, also sent warnings and prophecies to those who slept at shrines and temples. The earliest Greek beliefs about dreams were that their gods physically visited
12750-518: The philosophy of art. While such studies inevitably deal with issues of meaning, another approach to signification was suggested by the American philosopher, logician, and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce . "Images" are one type of the broad category of "signs" proposed by Peirce. Although his ideas are complex and have changed over time, the three categories of signs that he distinguished stand out: A single image may exist in all three categories at
12875-401: The point at coordinates (x,y). In literature, a " mental image " may be developed through words and phrases to which the senses respond. It involves picturing an image mentally, also called imagining, hence imagery. It can both be figurative and literal. Negative emotion In psychology , negative affectivity ( NA ), or negative affect , is a personality variable that involves
13000-556: The procedure, participants had to describe their interpretations after looking at patterns of judgments about people. Afterwards, participants were exposed to a mood induction process, where they had to watch videotapes designed to elicit negative or positive affectivity. Results showed that participants with positive affectivity were more negative and discriminated more than participants with negative affectivity. Also, happy participants were more likely to discriminate between in-group and out-group members than sad participants. Negative affect
13125-404: The same human subject. Non-invasive measures of brain activity like electroencephalogram (EEG) voltage averaging or cerebral blood flow cannot identify small but influential neuronal populations. Also, fMRI signals are too slow to explain how brains compute in real time. Scientists researching some brain functions can work around current restrictions by examining animal subjects. As stated by
13250-471: The same time. The Statue of Liberty provides an example. While there have been countless two-dimensional and three-dimensional "reproductions" of the statue (i.e., "icons" themselves), the statue itself exists as The nature of images, whether three-dimensional or two-dimensional, created for a specific purpose or only for aesthetic pleasure, has continued to provoke questions and even condemnation at different times and places. In his dialogue, The Republic ,
13375-509: The sleeper's eyelids were closed. Marcus Tullius Cicero , for his part, believed that all dreams are produced by thoughts and conversations a dreamer had during the preceding days. Cicero's Somnium Scipionis described a lengthy dream vision, which in turn was commented on by Macrobius in his Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis . Herodotus in his The Histories , writes "The visions that occur to us in dreams are, more often than not,
13500-445: The study in a lecture hall and witnessed what they thought was an unexpected five-minute belligerent encounter between an intruder and the lecturer. A week later, these participants watched a 10-minute-long video that generated either a positive, negative or neutral mood. They then completed a brief questionnaire about the previous incident between the intruder and lecturer that they witnessed the week earlier. In this questionnaire half of
13625-447: The subconscious and affective, thus evading direct inquiry through contemplative reasoning. By doing so such axiomatic images let us know what we shall desire (liberalism, in a snapshot: the crunchy honey-flavored cereals and the freshly-pressed orange juice in the back of a suburban one-family home) and from what we shall obstain (communism, in a snapshot: lifeless crowds of men and machinery marching towards certain perdition accompanied by
13750-574: The subject's memory of the dream, not the subject's dream experience itself. So, dreaming by non-humans is currently unprovable, as is dreaming by human fetuses and pre-verbal infants. Preserved writings from early Mediterranean civilizations indicate a relatively abrupt change in subjective dream experience between Bronze Age antiquity and the beginnings of the classical era . In visitation dreams reported in ancient writings, dreamers were largely passive in their dreams, and visual content served primarily to frame authoritative auditory messaging. Gudea ,
13875-963: The successful predictions than unsuccessful ones. Graphic artists, writers and filmmakers all have found dreams to offer a rich vein for creative expression. In the West, artists' depictions of dreams in Renaissance and Baroque art often were related to Biblical narrative. Especially preferred by visual artists were the Jacob's Ladder dream in Genesis and St. Joseph's dreams in the Gospel according to Matthew . Many later graphic artists have depicted dreams, including Japanese woodblock artist Hokusai (1760–1849) and Western European painters Rousseau (1844–1910), Picasso (1881–1973), and Dalí (1904–1989). In literature, dream frames were frequently used in medieval allegory to justify
14000-804: The target. The results revealed that the participants who watched the emotion-induced video were more likely to incorrectly identify the innocent foil than to correctly identify the perpetrator. Neutral participants were more likely to correctly identify the perpetrator in comparison to their emotional counterparts. This demonstrates that emotional affect in forensic settings decreases accuracy of eyewitness memory. These findings are consistent with prior knowledge that stress and emotion greatly impair eyewitness ability to recognitive perpetrators. Negative affectivity can produce several interpersonal benefits. It can cause subjects to be more polite and considerate with others. Unlike positive mood, which causes less assertive approaches, negative affectivity can, in many ways, cause
14125-494: The terms that have replaced "persistence of vision", though no one term seems adequate to describe the process. Image-making seems to have been common to virtually all human cultures since at least the Paleolithic era . Prehistoric examples of rock art —including cave paintings , petroglyphs , rock reliefs , and geoglyphs —have been found on every inhabited continent. Many of these images seem to have served various purposes: as
14250-501: The things we have been concerned about during the day." The Dreaming is a common term within the animist creation narrative of indigenous Australians for a personal, or group, creation and for what may be understood as the "timeless time" of formative creation and perpetual creating. Some Indigenous American tribes and Mexican populations believe that dreams are a way of visiting and having contact with their ancestors . Some Native American tribes have used vision quests as
14375-488: The time and are more prevalent in young to mid-teens. Another study showed that 8% of both men's and women's dreams have sexual content. In some cases, sexual dreams may result in orgasms or nocturnal emissions . These are colloquially known as "wet dreams". The visual nature of dreams is generally highly phantasmagoric; that is, different locations and objects continuously blend into each other. The visuals (including locations, people, and objects) are generally reflective of
14500-448: The time. The small details the negative individual picks up may be something completely overlooked before. Anxiety disorders are often associated with over-thinking and ruminating on topics that would seem irrelevant and pointless to an individual without a disorder. OCD is one common anxiety trait that allows the affected individual a different insight on how things may appear to be. A person that makes use of his or her negative affect has
14625-598: The truth. First, music was used to induce positive, negative, or neutral affect in participants. Then, experimenters played 14 video messages that had to be identified by participants as true or false. As expected, the negative affect group performed better in veracity judgments than the positive affect group who performed no better than chance. Researchers believe that the negative affect groups detected deception more successfully because they attended to stimulus details and systematically built inferences from those details. Memory has been found to have many failures that affect
14750-579: The tunes of Soviet Russian songs). What makes those images so powerful is that it is only of relative minor relevance for the stabilization of such images whether they actually capture and correspond with the multiple layers of reality, or not. Despite, or perhaps because of, the widespread use of religious and spiritual imagery worldwide, the making of images and the depiction of gods or religious subjects has been subject to criticism, censorship, and criminal penalties. The Abrahamic religions ( Judaism , Christianity , and Islam ) all have had admonitions against
14875-518: The two equally. Researchers concluded that impression formation is improved by negative affect. Their findings support theories that negative affect results in more elaborate processing based upon external, available information. The systematic, attentive approach caused by negative affect reduces fundamental attribution error , the tendency to inaccurately attribute behavior to a person's internal character without taking external, situational factors into account. The fundamental attribution error (FAE)
15000-507: The use of religious imagery. Islam tends to discourage religious depictions, sometimes quite rigorously, and often extends that to other forms of realistic imagery, favoring calligraphy or geometric designs instead. Depending on time and place, photographs and broadcast images in Islamic societies may be less subject to outright prohibition. In any religion, restrictions on image-making are especially targeted to avoid depictions of "false gods" in
15125-509: The verdict of the O.J. Simpson trial were more likely to falsely believe something occurred during the trial than those who were displeased with the verdict. Another experiment found the same findings with Red Sox fans and Yankees fans in their overall memory of events that occurred in the final game of a 2004 playoff series in which the Red Sox defeated the Yankees. The study found that the Yankees fans had better memory of events that occurred than
15250-407: The viewer's context. A religious image in a church may be regarded differently than the same image mounted in a museum. Some might view it simply as an object to be bought or sold. Viewers' reactions will also be guided or shaped by their education, class, race, and other contexts. The study of emotional sensations and their relationship to any given image falls into the categories of aesthetics and
15375-486: Was believed significantly more than theories of dreaming that attribute dream content to memory consolidation, problem-solving, or as a byproduct of unrelated brain activity. The same study found that people attribute more importance to dream content than to similar thought content that occurs while they are awake. Americans were more likely to report that they would intentionally miss their flight if they dreamt of their plane crashing than if they thought of their plane crashing
15500-406: Was developed to eliminate redundant and ambiguous items and thereby derive an efficient measure for general use in research situations where either time or space are limited, or where international populations are of interest but where English may not be the mother tongue. Studies have indicated that negative affect has important, beneficial impacts on cognition and behavior. These developments were
15625-456: Was sharply reduced in later millennia. These ancient writings about dreams highlight visitation dreams, where a dream figure, usually a deity or a prominent forebear, commands the dreamer to take specific actions, and which may predict future events. Framing the dream experience varies across cultures as well as through time. Dreaming and sleep are intertwined. Dreams occur mainly in the rapid-eye movement (REM) stage of sleep —when brain activity
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