Go to Bed and You MIGHT Feel Better in the Morning—the Effect of Sleep on Affective Tone and Intrusiveness of Emotional Memories

Abstract

Purpose of Review It is important to examine what effect sleep has after an emotional experience. More knowledge about this topic could help inform us whether there are any potential sleep interventions that could help make sure that memories of negative emotional experiences are processed in the most adaptive manner possible. Recent Findings Findings on the role of sleep in altering reactivity to emotional stimuli have been highly varied, with significant findings in opposite directions. A new exciting development in the field is several studies finding that sleep seems to make memories of negative experiences less intrusive. Summary This review has mainly aimed to give an overview of the field, and of which issues need to be resolved. We argue for there being a strong need for standardization of how data are analyzed and presented, as well as for better methods for determining to what extent the effects of sleep are specific for a particular memory, or represent general changes in emotional reactivity.

The influence of sleep on fear extinction in trauma-related disorders

“…Sleep supports the consolidation and generalization of fear and extinction memories in laboratory studies with healthy adults, and sleep is widely hypothesized to also do so following analog (experimental) trauma as well as actual trauma and its treatment with exposure-based therapies ( Chellappa and Aeschbach, 2022 ; Colvonen et al., 2019 ; Davidson and Pace-Schott, 2020 , 2021 ; Pace-Schott et al., 2015a , b ). Whereas findings remain mixed, both rapid eye-movement (REM) sleep and slow wave sleep (SWS) have been linked to processing these types of emotional experiences ( Colvonen et al., 2019 ; Davidson and Pace-Schott, 2020 ; Pace-Schott et al., 2015a , b ; Schenker et al., 2021 ).…”

The Effect of Sleep on Intrusive Memories in Daily Life: A Meta-analysis of Trauma Film Experiments

“…Sleep did not significantly affect the mean distress associated with intrusive memories in the current meta-analysis. This is perhaps not so surprising considering that studies on the effect of sleep on emotional reactivity to reminders of emotional experiences have revealed contradictory results [5]. For this meta-analysis, we assigned a mean intrusion distress value of zero to participants who did not have any intrusions at all during the experimental week.…”

“…The current meta-analysis did not examine the effect of particular sleep stages, total sleep time, or sleep quality on intrusive memories. Several studies have examined the effects of particular sleep stages on intrusion frequency and distress, but no clear patterns have emerged (see [5] for a summary of these findings).…”

“…For instance, recent meta-analytic work has revealed that sleep, as compared to wake, leads to enhanced memory performance for material encoded prior to the sleep manipulation [3,4]. Sleep has also been suggested to moderate emotional reactivity to stressful events, although the direction of such changes has varied between studies [5]. Traditionally, research on the effect of sleep on emotional memories has focused on intentional retrieval of explicit memories, or on affective reactivity to reminders of the emotional stimuli.…”

“…This lack of integration would then make the memory more intrusive and distressing. Since then, two more studies have also found sleep to reduce the number of intrusions [10,11], whereas two studies have found no group differences [12,13] (for narrative reviews, see [5,14,15]). Based on the mixed findings across these studies, a meta-analysis could clarify the current status of this literature and inform future research on this topic by examining the emergent pattern of the association between sleep and intrusions with all studies combined.…”