Contributing factors predicting nightmares in children: Trauma, anxiety, dissociation, and emotion regulation

There is little research in the current literature regarding contributing factors to nightmares in children. This study aimed to test potentially overlapping predictors of nightmare distress and severity, including anxiety, dissociation, trauma history, vagal tone, and parental processing of emotions.

Sixty parent-child dyads (children ages 6-11) filled out a variety of child-report and parent-observation inventories on nightmare frequency and distress, dissociation, anxiety, and trauma history of the child. Children were monitored on heart rate variability and vagal tone. Both parent and child participated in a discussion of positive and negative life events that were later coded for degree of parent processing of emotional information.

Anxiety, trauma history, dissociation, and baseline vagal tone accounted for 39% of the variance in nightmare distress. Anxiety and dissociation were positive predictors of nightmare distress in the multiple regression. Parent processing variables were weak predictors in the current analysis.

The predictive power of anxiety, dissociation, vagal tone, and trauma history was not entirely due to their overlap, as shown by uniquely significant beta weights in the prediction of distress. Treatment procedures with multiple intervention points targeting physiological and psychological sources of nightmare distress may be warranted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).