Moderating effects of sleep difficulties on relations between posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms and positive memory count

Abstract

Objectives Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) severity relates to positive memory retrieval difficulties. One variable potentially influencing this relation is sleep difficulties. We examined moderating effects of sleep difficulties (duration and quality) on relations between PTSD severity and count of specific positive memories covarying for age, gender, and depression. Methods Participants were an Amazon Mechanical Turk‐recruited trauma‐exposed community sample of 205 respondents (M age = 35.44; 61.40% women). Results Moderated regression analyses indicated significant interaction effects between sleep quality (b = 0.03; p = 0.036) and PTSD severity on specific positive memory count. Among individuals reporting better sleep quality, there were negative associations between PTSD severity and specific positive memory count (b = −0.04, SE = 0.02, p = 0.010). Similar results were obtained for PTSD's intrusion and arousal clusters. Conclusion Results support targeting sleep quality and PTSD severity to improve positive memory retrieval in PTSD and memory interventions, and the importance of considering sleep when examining links between PTSD and positive memory retrieval.