A Research On The Differences Of Dream Contens And Characteristics Between Chinese And Canadian Undergraduate Students

Since the birth ofpsychoana lysis, the analysis of dream has become one of the most significant activities in psychotherapy and counseling. The publication of "interpretation of dreams" marks the dream research entered a scientific age. The status of dream in the psychological study became increasingly important, psychologist started sudy dream in a from a different aspects.As a developing country, China is under the influence of the Oriental culture, especially the Confucian culture. To be a representative of the western developed countries, Canada has a characteristic of North America cultural and Christian culture dominated the whole social life. In a word, both of them represent the different culture types. In order to achieve the following three goals:(1) understand the contents and characteristics of the dream between Chinese and Canadian citizens under the two different cultural background; (2) explore the specific performance of cross-cultural similarities and cross-cultural differences between the two countries citizens; (3) further enrich the cross-cultural research of dream, this study was composed of following two specific researches:Research one, using the MRD to collect 121 Chinese undergraduate students dreams and 133 Canadian undergraduate students dreams and adopting Hall/Van de Castle system to encode the content of dreams.The research results show that:(1) Although the dreams of two countries students have many similarities, but there are still some significant differences. Chinese students report more friends, at least one friendliness, failure and striving, but Canadian students report more dead and imaginary people, animals, aggressive, self-negativity, success and bodily misfortune. (2) No matter in Chinese or Canadian students, the male students report more attacks than the female. (3) By analysis and comparison of 15 kinds of emotional experience between Chinese and Canadian students dreams, we found that in addition to frustration, Chinese students were higher than Canadian students in the other 14 types of emotional experience.Among them, the Canadian students report more frustration experience, but Chinese students report more joy/happiness, embarrassment, and ecstatic experience. Gender has influence on college students dreams emotional experience in a certain. The male students experience more sex drive/sexual excitement than female students.Research two:using the "Dream Intensity Scale" investigated the characteristics of the dreams between 203 Chinese college students and 420 Canadian students. The research results show that there are much differenceson the dream characteristics between Chinese and Canadian students. The scores of Canadian students were significantly higher than Chinese students in the following four dimensions:dream quantity, dream vividness, dream diffusion and altered dream episodes.Finally, the limitations of the present research were discussed; the future directions, theoretical implications and practical value of this paper were provided.