Task 6

Question 1

What has inadequate sleep linked with?

Answer 1

• Inadequate sleep (duration, continuity, quality) has been linked with fewer positive and more negative emotions

Question 2

Which paradigm do experimental studies on sleep and emotional generation use?

Answer 2

• affective ratings of emotional IAPS (International Affective Picture System) images
  –> outcomes vary considerable -> explanation: (differnt images used) OR different sleep paradigms: REM deprivation vs. NREM deprivation
  > gender compositions of the sample + fMRI scanner noise may also affect sleep quality

Question 3

What are the effects of sleep on emotional appraisal?

Answer 3

• nighttime sleep maintained negative appraisal of previously viewed IAPS images
• while daytime sleep attenuated (abschwächen) appraisal
• REM sleep mainly associated with emotional memory consolidation and preserving their affective tone
  (some studies)

Question 4

Is there evidence for the “sleep to forget, sleep to remember” model?

Answer 4

• sleep actually decreases the emotional tone associated with memories (some studies)

Question 5

What could explain the discrepancy of role of sleep in preserving emotional appraisal?

Answer 5

Emotional intensity!

low vs. high intense negative event

Question 6

Evidence from studies using partial sleep restriction (AMYGDALA)

Answer 6

• one week of sleep deprivation (4.5 hours) –> negative emotional changes (adults)
• sleep deprivation affects amygdala and ACC activation: sleep-deprived for 35 hours showed a 60% increase in amygdala activity after viewing negative images –> probably highted reaction
• also Putamen and VTA were more sensitive due to sleep deprivation

Question 7

Difference between sleep deprivation of REM or NREM sleep?

Answer 7

• REM deprivation –> increased activity in response to negative stimuli
• NREM deprivation –> decreased activity
• -> REM may be important for emotional processing
• -> possible explanation for differing findings

Question 8

Effects of sleep deprivation on subjective emotional experience?

Answer 8

Studies:in adolescents:
- decreases in various positive emotions (joy, interest, cheerfulness) after one night of sleep deprivation (compared to ideal sleep), but no differences in negative emotions –> general affective imbalance

Question 9

Situation selection and sleep

Insufficient sleep may impair situation selection in the following ways:

Answer 9

• less motivated to seek out rewarding social activities
• daytime sleeping may lead to less social interactions
• altered reward circuit: sleep-deprived individuals are impaired in delayed gratification!
• more likely to experience negative social situation
  o safety behavior: sleep-deprived individuals are more involved in accidents
  o avoidance: more likely to call in sick, skip social events

–> research focuses mainly on implicit strategies of situation selection and not explicit ones (actively and consciously avoiding a situation)

Question 10

Situation modification and sleep

Answer 10

• sleep deprivation -> problems with self-monitoring, appropriate interactions, picking up non-verbal cues and identifying other’s emotions
• -> sleep-deprived individuals are less empathetic, have trouble relating to others, are less productive, show poor impulse control and more deviant behavior in the workplace
• problems with impulse control maybe more physical risk-taking (inadequate sleep linked to more workspace accidents) –> worse handling social and workspace situations

Question 11

Attention deployment and sleep

Answer 11

• distraction decreases activity in emotional areas after seeing negative emotional content - sleep deprivation shows an opposite effect
• -> no study has explicitly looked at the effects of sleep on distraction, but the following findings suggest a connection:
• one night of sleep deprivation -> difficulty in inhibiting responses to negative (nogo) - but not to positive stimuli (go) (in go/nogo task)
• sleep deprivation -> negative stimuli get more distracting during a delayed-response task –> impaired WM & subjective distractibility
• increased AMY activation + reduced connectivity with frontal brain areas -> corresponding to impaired emotional regulation
• ERP results:
  o positive and negative IAPS images produces larger late positive potential, compared to neutral images –> inability to shift attention between emotional and non-emotional information
  o opposite results show that the reactivity towards negative images only is greater
• problems in recognizing and general processing of emotions in others
• attention to threatening faces is maintained, while attention to non-threatening faces is impaired!
  o increased neural activity for threats, but decreased reactivity for non-threatening faces
  o disrupted sleep may impair attention to emotional information and increase the salience of negative, threatening information –> possibly adaptive

Question 12

Cognitive Change and sleep

Answer 12

• cognitive reappraisal is a component of executive functioning in which one reframes an emotional event in order to decrease its impact (Gruber).
• -> associated with increased activation in PFC, while sleep deprivation shows a dose-response effect on such generative cognitive functions.
• people who use reappraisal may be less susceptible to the negative effects by sleep deprivation on late positive potential responses (ERP) in response to negative stimuli
• -> sleep affect reappraisal, but reappraisal may also protect from other sleep-induced deficits!
• not much evidence, but some studies show that cognitive reappraisal does not differ between a sleep-deprived and a control group, suggesting that cognitive reappraisal may be somewhat resistant to sleep loss effects

Question 13

Response Modulation and sleep

Answer 13

• sleep deprivation makes people use less positive emotion words and more negative emotion words, as well as changing their voice (i.e. sadness, low arousal, anxious). However, they were not asked to directly apply ER. Intentional modulation of emotions may be more resistant to sleep effects, as participants in one study could still respond compatibly or incompatibly to emotional stimuli.

Question 14

Extended model of emotion regulation and sleep

Answer 14

• Identification: sleep may improve emotional awareness, i.e. mindfulness. Being attentive to ones emotions in a non-judgmental way may improve emotional regulation.
• Selection: no direct research available; intuitively, selection of a regulatory strategy depends on the personal resources and the emotional context, which may be influenced by sleep
• Implementation: no direct research available; sleep influences cognitive flexibility, which may be required to successfully implement appropriate strategies in a situation

Question 15

Palmer & Alfano (2017) – Sleep and emotion regulation: An organizing, integrative review - limitation

Answer 15

• Many studies do not properly distinguish the effects of sleep on emotional generation vs. on emotion regulation
• Little research in which participants were explicitly asked to regulate their emotions  Does sleep impact regulation ability or regulation tendency?

Question 16

Palmer & Alfano (2017) – Sleep and emotion regulation: An organizing, integrative review –> neurological stuff

Answer 16

…

Question 17

Emotional memory encoding

Answer 17

• Sleep deprivation, but not selective REM sleep deprivation, interferes with the ability to encode emotional pictures. This suggests that sleep per se is involved in emotional memory encoding.
• Impairs encoding of contextual and non-contextual memory aspects
• Non-contextual stimuli were still recognized by sleep deprived individuals  resistance
   Sleep is crucial for emotional memory encoding

Question 18

Emotional memory consolidation & sleep

Answer 18

Sleep is necessary for consolidation, most likely via offline memory reactivation mechanisms (e.g. in the hippocampus). Studies often use the targeted memory reactivation paradigm, in which memory cues are presented during waking or sleeping. Conflicting results:

• Oudiette et al.: Waking reactivation strengthens single, salient memories, while sleeping reactivation links categorically related memories together
• Emotional memories may be reactivated only during NREM, but not during REM sleep
• Other studies show no effect during NREM sleep in negative picture recognition
• Wagner et al.: Sleep seems to selectively favor the retention of negative emotional texts compared to neutral ones. Emotional memory enhancement for negative texts persisted for several years. A single night of sleep may improve consolidation of familiarity, so improve “know” judgements (non-contextual memory). A nap may be sufficient to boost negative memory consolidation.

Question 19

Emotional memory consolidation & sleep deprivation

Answer 19

• “remember” responses of neutral and positive stimuli was deteriorated, while negative memories were not affected
• “familiarity” responses are not affected by sleep deprivation
• Mood-state-dependent memory (MDM) effect – memory performance is worse for neutral items learned and recalled in two different mood states:
  o Occurred only in sleep deprivation condition
  o Sleep reduces the contextual emotional interference effect  sleep make us forget the mood component of the memory
• Most likely requires several cycles of NREM and REM sleep

Question 20

Emotional reactivity & sleep

Answer 20

Emotions are considered to be a combination of valence and arousal. Both dimensions were not affected by NREM or REM sleep. Highly negative images were rated less negative after a wakeful period, but not after a sleep period of 12 hrs. Other studies suggest that sleep increases emotional reactivity, while REM sleep deprivation may reduce emotional reactivity to negative stimuli  mixed findings

Question 21

Emotional reactivity & sleep deprivation

Answer 21

Without adequate sleep, negative reactions to aversive experiences are enhanced, while positive reactions to pleasant experiences are attenuated. Poor sleep enhanced the negative aspects of a neutral stimulus and increases emotional reactions to these stimuli. May involve focusing ones attention on these aspects and depleting attentional resources for positive events.

Question 22

Sleep and facial emotional cues identification

Answer 22

Sleep loss impairs the ability to discriminate threatening from friendly faces and generally leads to an overestimation of the threat posed by face stimuli. Sleep loss affects the recognition of more subtle facial cues necessary for social interactions, while sparing the recognition of primitive, survival-oriented emotional facial cues communicating immediate threat.

Question 23

Sleep and empathy

Answer 23

55h of sleep deprivation were associated with lower scores on social intelligence and EQ. Even just one night of sleep deprivation led to decreased empathy (i.e. sharing the emotional state of others) with your partner and in general. Specifically poorer sleep quality was associated with lower empathy, sociability and emotional intelligence.

Question 24

Sleep, fear memory and extinction memory

Answer 24

Findings support the role of REM sleep in fear conditioning and fear extinction, but beneficial role of SWS has also been reported. REM sleep is important for consolidating both danger and safety stimuli. REM sleep and fear conditioning/extinction activate the same fear network (i.e. amygdala, vmPFC, insula, thalamus, dorsal ACC).  both adaptive

Question 25

Sleep, threat generalization and extinction generalization

Answer 25

Sleep may promote extinction generalization to other stimuli, while lack of sleep enhances threat generalization and discrimination of threatening stimuli  adaptive. However, the evidence is still mixed

Question 26

REM sleep and emotional memory processing

Answer 26

During REM, neuromodulators promote memory consolidation, but protecting it from arousal-related noradrenergic interference. Accordingly, memory for negative stimuli compared to neutral ones is enhanced.
- Split night paradigm – REM sleep can selectively enhance consolidation of emotional stimuli
- Napping paradigm – REM sleep enhanced consolidation for emotional, negative memories; however other studies show opposite effects or a significant effect of NREM sleep
Sleep-dependent consolidation of emotional memories benefits from complex interaction between stages during NREM-REM cycles. Some evidence suggests distinct, but complementary roles of SWS and REM.

Question 27

REM sleep and emotional reactivity

Answer 27

• look table

Question 28

Emotional reactivity and sleep

Emotional memory formation and sleep

Answer 28

• sleep deprivation leads to hyper-limbic response to negative stimuli and to dysfunctional connectivity between amygdala and mPFC (i.e. failure in top-down control); sleep deprivation may also be linked to a more general hyper-reactivity to positive and negative valence
• sleep may be important for hippocampal-dependent memory formation; sleep deprivation impairs positive/neutral memory consolidation, while retention of negative stimuli was intact
  o Wakeful group used hippocampal-neocortical connection, while sleep deprived group relied on amygdala-neocortical network during negative memory recall
  o Most likely reflects integration of new info into existing memories

Question 29

Gruber study

Answer 29

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