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Studies have not only shown that a period of sleep following learning offers greater benefits to later memory than a period of wakefulness, but also that sleep actively promotes those components of memories that are emotionally salient. However, sleep’s role in emotional memory consolidation has largely been investigated with memories that are spec...
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Citations
... Emerging evidence suggests that REM sleep favors the successful consolidation of extinction memory [33][34][35][36][37] . Other studies showed that REM sleep helps to decrease the experienced affective tonus, thus leading to higher familiarity with emotionally negative stimuli (emotional depotentiation) [38][39][40] and to the consolidation of positive emotional memories 41,42 . Developing experimental strategies aiming at leveraging these contributions of REM sleep could offer new therapeutic avenues for disorders with deficient emotion regulation (e.g., mood disorders, anxiety disorders, nightmares). ...
... Concurring with scarce previous research 41,42 , this study provides experimental evidence for a role of REM in the consolidation of positive associative memories. The underlying mechanisms of IRT and TMR may have converging (possibly additive) effects on the emotionality of the dream experience, and not strictly to the specific changes in dream emotionality implied by each of these mechanisms. ...
Background
Nightmare disorder (ND) is characterized by dreams with strong negative emotions occurring during rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep. ND is mainly treated by imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT), where the patients are asked to change the negative story line of their nightmare to a more positive one.
Methods
We used targeted memory reactivation (TMR) during REM sleep to strengthen IRT-related memories and accelerate remission of ND. Thirty-six patients (27 women) with ND were asked to perform an initial IRT session and, while they generated a positive outcome of their recurrent nightmare, half of the patients were exposed to a sound (TMR group), while no such pairing with a sound took place for the other half (control group). During the next two weeks, all patients performed IRT every evening at home, and were exposed to the sound during REM sleep with a wireless headband, which automatically detected sleep stages. The frequency of nightmares per week at 2 weeks and at a three-month follow-up was used as primary outcome measure.
Results
We found that the patients of the TMR group had less frequent nightmares (p=.026, Cohen’s d=1.05) and more positive dream emotions (p=.004, Cohen’s d=1.06) than patients of the control group after two weeks of IRT, and a sustained decrease of nightmares after 3 months (p=.006, Cohen’s d=1.45).
Conclusions
By demonstrating the effectiveness of TMR during sleep to potentiate therapy, these results have clinical implications for the management of ND, with plausible relevance for learning-based therapies in other psychiatric diseases. Additionally, these findings show that TMR applied during REM sleep can modulate emotions in dreams.
Clinical trial registration
ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT05237778
... This study utilized negative scenes because the trade-off effect is already well established with this material (Payne et al., 2008). While preliminary studies suggest that the trade-off effect for positive scenes may be less robust than for negative scenes Kensinger, 2009, 2011;Chambers and Payne, 2014b), it will nevertheless be important to understand how expectation affects positive memory consolidation going forward. ...
Successful prospective memory is necessarily driven by an expectation that encoded information will be relevant in the future, leading to its preferential placement in memory storage. Like expectation, emotional salience is another type of cue that benefits human memory formation. Although separate lines of research suggest that both emotional information and information explicitly expected to be important in the future benefit memory consolidation, it is unknown how expectation affects the processing of emotional information and whether sleep, which is known to maximize memory consolidation, plays a critical role. The purpose of this study was to investigate how expectation would impact the consolidation of emotionally salient content, and whether this impact would differ across delays of sleep and wake. Participants encoded scenes containing an emotionally charged negative or neutral foreground object placed on a plausible neutral background. After encoding, half of the participants were informed they would later be tested on the scenes (expected condition), while the other half received no information about the test (unexpected condition). At recognition, following a 12-h delay of sleep or wakefulness, the scene components (objects and backgrounds) were presented separately and one at a time, and participants were asked to determine if each component was old or new. Results revealed a greater disparity for memory of negative objects over their paired neutral backgrounds for both the sleep and wake groups when the memory test was expected compared to when it was unexpected, while neutral memory remained unchanged. Analyzing each group separately, the wake group showed a threefold increase in the magnitude of this object/background trade-off for emotional scenes when the memory test was expected compared to when it was unexpected, while those who slept performed similarly across conditions. These results suggest that emotional salience and expectation cues interact to benefit emotional memory consolidation during a delay of wakefulness. The sleeping brain, however, may automatically tag emotionally salient information as important, such that explicit instruction of an upcoming memory test does not further improve memory performance.
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 (Mage = 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.
