A Spillover Model of Dreams and Work Behavior: How Dream Meaning Ascription Promotes Awe and Employee Resilience
研究提出梦境体验会溢出影响工作行为，发现早晨回忆并赋予梦境积极意义会激发敬畏情绪，进而提升员工当日韧性和目标进展，且该效应受特质认知好奇心调节。
Sleep and employee behavior are linked. While the dominant explanations for this link involve physiology and cognitive resources, we offer a different perspective. We suggest that dreams, or psychological experiences during sleep, spill over to affect employee behavior. This spillover effect, we argue, results from the interplay between dreaming, meaning creation, and emotion. Taking a morning-of perspective, we theorize that recalling and ascribing meaning to dream experiences elicits awe—an epistemic emotion produced by appraisals of vastness and a need for cognitive accommodation. In turn, because awe reduces individuals’ focus on themselves and their concerns, we argue that experiencing awe upon awakening increases employee resilience, and ultimately goal progress, throughout the workday. However, because awe entails a felt need to expand one’s existing ways of knowing, employees may vary in their receptivity to awe. We therefore argue that the link between awe and resilience hinges on trait epistemic curiosity, or employees’ inherent desire to seek and acquire new knowledge. Across three studies—including a morning-of field study, a single-day morning-afternoon study, and a two-week experience sampling study—we find that ascribing positive meaning to dreams elicits awe, which in turn promotes resilience, and ultimately goal progress, throughout the workday.