06/11/2023, 16:26 Sleep and emotional processing

Sleep and emotional

processing
A growing body of literature suggests
that sleep plays a critical role in
emotional processing. This review aims
at synthesizing current evidence on t…
8 min. read

Summary
A growing body of literature suggests that sleep
plays a critical role in emotional processing.
This review aims at synthesizing current evi‐
dence on the role of sleep and sleep loss in the
modulation of emotional reactivity, emotional
memory formation, empathic behavior, fear
conditioning, threat generalization and extinc‐
tion memory. Behavioral and neurophysiologi‐
cal evidence suggesting that rapid-eye move‐
ment (REM) sleep plays an important role in
emotional processing is also discussed.
Furthermore, we examine the relations between
sleep and emotions by reviewing the functional
neuroimaging studies that elucidated the brain
mechanisms underlying these relations. It is
shown that sleep supports the formation of

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emotional episodic memories throughout all

the stages that compose memory processing.
On the contrary, sleep loss deteriorates both the
encoding of emotional information and the
emotional memory consolidation processes.

Research is also progressively providing new

insights into the protective role of sleep in hu‐
man emotional homeostasis and regulation,
promoting adaptive next-day emotional reactiv‐
ity. In this respect, evidence converges in indi‐
cating that lack of sleep significantly influences
emotional reactivity. Moreover, not‐
withstanding some contradictory findings, the
processing of emotionally salient information
could mainly benefit from REM sleep.
However, some crucial aspects of sleep-depen‐
dent emotional modulation remain unclear.

Introduction
Although the critical and active role of sleep in
the processes of memory consolidation and
integration is nowadays largely acknowledged,
we still lack any consensus about the specific
role of sleep in affective and emotional
processing. Nevertheless, several recent
behavioral and neuroimaging studies revealed
the alterations imposed by sleep loss to
emotional reactivity [1], ∗[2], [3] and emotional
memory [4], ∗[5], [6], ∗[7], [8]. This review
aims to provide a synthesis of these recent
findings in healthy humans, with the goal of
analyzing the role of sleep in the different
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components of emotional processing. In the

first section, we discuss the main behavioral
and psychophysiological studies that
investigated the role of sleep in the processes of
encoding and consolidation of emotional
memory. Subsequently, we examine how sleep
modulates emotion regulation. In particular, we
will review relevant studies about the effects of
sleep on emotional reactivity and on more
complex emotional processes, such as those
involved in the identification of facial emotions
and empathy. Moreover, we discuss the role of
sleep in fear conditioning memory, threat
generalization and extinction memory. In the
second section, we address the specific role of
REM sleep in the consolidation of emotional
memory and in the modulation of emotional
reactivity, focusing on the specific physiological
REM features that prompted some researchers
to suggest its crucial involvement in emotional
processing. In the third section, we further
examine the relations between sleep and
emotions by reviewing the functional
neuroimaging studies that elucidated the brain
mechanisms underlying these relations. We will
observe how these studies have identified,
especially during REM sleep, the activation of
specific brain areas that are involved in human
emotional processing, providing new insights
into the protective role of sleep in human
emotional homeostasis and regulation.

Section snippets
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The relations between sleep and

emotions: behavioral and
psychophysiological studies
The sleep deprivation paradigm has been
extensively applied to investigate the relations
between sleep and learning/memory
consolidation by means of different
experimental approaches ∗[9], [10]. Within this
general framework, the beneficial effect of sleep
on declarative and procedural memory has
been robustly demonstrated [11].

Substantial evidence has been also provided

that sleep specifically contributes to emotional
memory consolidation ∗[7], [12], ∗[13], [14],
[15], while sleep deprivation

Since its discovery [108], REM sleep has been

closely linked to human emotion, being almost
invariantly associated with reports of
emotionally intense, vivid dreams [109]. A large
literature now suggests that the link between
REM sleep and emotion, rather than only a
phenomenological coincidence, is substantial
[110].

Based on the neuromodulator state during

REM sleep (i.e., high acetylcholinergic tone), it
has been proposed that during this sleep stage,
memories within the neocortex, subjected

Sleep and emotions: insights into

the brain mechanisms by
neuroimaging studies

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In recent years neuroimaging studies have

suggested that brain areas implicated in
emotional memory functions during
wakefulness are reactivated during sleep [90].
The earlier PET studies indeed demonstrated
specific neuronal network activity throughout
REM sleep within the amygdala, entorhinal
cortex and anterior cingulate cortex [128],
[129], [91], [130]. The increased activity during
REM sleep of the emotion-related brain regions
has been substantiated by fMRI [91] and EEG–
fMRI

Critical points and future avenues

of research
The relationship between sleep and emotional
processing has received recent scientific
interest, with a variety of evidence accumulated
so far, supporting an active role of sleep or of
specific sleep stages in the processing of salient
episodic memories and in emotional regulation.
To date, several questions remain unanswered,
since research produced contradictory results.
Several factors that potentially contributed to
generating contrasting results should be
considered. First, the

Conclusions
Research on the relations between sleep and
emotional processing has accompanied the
exponential growth of sleep research in the last
two decades. A large body of evidence supports
the notion that sleep is critical for the formation
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of episodic memories including emotionally-

valenced information throughout all the stages
of this process.

In the context of emotional processing, negative

memories seem to be more resistant to the
effect of sleep loss during the encoding phase,
probably because such

Conflicts of interest
The authors do not have any conflicts of
interest to disclose.

The deleterious effects of sleep loss on

sleep-dependent memory and emotional
function have been documented in the
current literature. Yet, the effects of
insomnia-induced chronic sleep
disturbance on emotional short-term
memory have been scarcely investigated.
Twenty-one participants with subclinical
insomnia disorder (SID) and 20 healthy
participants (healthy control, HC)
performed a delayed recognition task of
emotional faces, and event-related
potentials (ERPs) involved in memory
encoding, retention, and retrieval of faces
across different emotional valences were
assessed. Behavioral findings revealed that
participants in the SID group had a larger
response bias, being more likely to perceive
negative faces as “old” faces presented in
the retrieval phase than those in the HC

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group. ERP findings revealed that

emotional faces in the SID vs. HC group
induced significantly smaller P1 and late
P3b and larger N170 amplitudes in the
encoding phase and smaller negative slow
wave (NSW) in the retention phase. In
retrieval phase, the interaction between
Sleep group and Valence were revealed for
P1 and early P3b amplitudes, but no group
differences were found after Bonferroni
correction. These findings suggested that
insomnia induced chronic sleep
disturbance would influence performance
on emotional working memory and
induced processing phase specific
regulation of neurophysiology in emotional
working memory regardless of valence.

Research suggests that genetic variants

linked to serotonin functioning moderate
the association between environmental
stressors and depressive symptoms, but
examining gene–environment interactions
with single polymorphisms limits power.

A multilocus genetic profile score (MGPS)

approach to measuring serotonergic
multilocus genetic variation and examined
interactions with interpersonal
relationship, insomnia with depressive
symptoms as outcomes in an adolescent
sample (average age = 14.15 ± 0.63 years
since first measurement; range: 13 to 15).

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(1) interpersonal relationship predicted

adolescent depressive symptoms; (2)
insomnia mediated the effect of
interpersonal relationships on adolescent
depressive symptoms; (3) the THP2 gene
rs4570625 polymorphism G allele was a
key risk factor for depressive symptom,
and the MGPS moderated the effects of
teacher-student relationship and insomnia
on adolescent depressive symptom.
Specifically, as the MGPS increased, the
effects of insomnia on adolescent
depressive symptom were enhanced;
further, when the MGPS score increased,
the effect of teacher-student relationship
on depression showed a similar
phenomenon with an increased slope and
enhanced prediction; and (4) the results of
sensitivity analysis showed that multilocus
genetic interaction with the environment
had a better explanatory power and
stability for depression than single
polymorphism studies.

MGPS provides substantial power to

examine gene–environmental interactions
linked to affective outcomes among
adolescents.

During rapid eye movement (REM) sleep,

newly consolidated memories can be
distorted to adjust the existing memory
base in memory integration. However, only

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a few studies have demonstrated the role of

REM sleep in memory distortion. The
present study aims to clarify the role of
REM sleep in the facilitation of memory
distortion, that is, hindsight bias,
compared to non-rapid eye movement
(NREM) sleep and wake states. The split-
night paradigm was used to segregate REM
and NREM sleep. The hypotheses are (1)
hindsight bias—memory distortion—is
more substantial during REM-rich sleep
(late-night sleep) than during NREM-rich
sleep (early-night sleep); (2) memory
stabilization is more substantial during
NREM-rich sleep (early-night sleep) than
during REM-rich sleep (late-night sleep);
and (3) memory distortion takes longer
time than memory stabilization. The
results of the hindsight bias test show that
more memory distortions were observed
after the REM condition in comparison to
the NREM condition. Contrary to the
hindsight bias, the correct response in the
word-pair association test was observed
more in the NREM than in the REM
condition. The difference in the hindsight
bias index between the REM and NREM
conditions was identified only one week
later. Comparatively, the difference in
correct responses in the word-pair
association task between the conditions
appeared three hours later and one week

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later. The present study found that (1)

memory distortion occurs more during
REM-rich sleep than during NREM-rich
sleep, while memory stabilization occurs
more during NREM-rich sleep than during
REM-rich sleep. Moreover, (2) the newly
encoded memory could be stabilized
immediately after encoding, but memory
distortion occurs over several days. These
results suggest that the roles of NREM and
REM sleep in memory processes could be
different.

Construction workers frequently

experience mental fatigue owing to the
high cognitive load of their tasks in a
dynamic, complex environment,
diminishing their cognitive ability and
mobility and necessitating monitoring to
ensure safety. Traditional fatigue
evaluations rely on the subjective judgment
of site managers and workers; this study
developed a wireless device to objectively
monitor the mental fatigue of construction
workers using electroencephalogram
(EEG) signals. The EEG signals of 16
construction workers were recorded while
they performed a continuous physical–
cognitive task, and the resulting EEG
time–frequency–energy data were
processed by a continuous wavelet
transform and convolutional neural
network to identify mental fatigue states
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without requiring manual feature

extraction. The cognitive fatigue state
classifications provided by the proposed
framework were shown to match the self-
reported fatigue states with 88.85%
accuracy. This method can therefore
facilitate real-time, continuously updating
fatigue identification to support safety
management on construction sites.

Facial expressions provide nonverbal cues

that are important for delivering and
interpreting human emotions. Previous
studies have shown that the ability to
interpret facial emotions correctly could be
partially impaired in sleep-deprived
people. People with insomnia might also
suffer from sleep loss, so we assumed that
facial expression recognition ability might
also be impaired in people with insomnia.
Despite a growing body of research
exploring insomnia's potential impacts on
facial expression recognition, conflicting
results have been reported, and no
systematic review of this research body has
been conducted. In this study, after
screening 1100 records identified through
database searches, six articles examining
insomnia and facial expression recognition
ability were included in a quantitative
synthesis. The main outcomes were
classification accuracy (ACC), reaction
time (RT), and intensity rating—the three
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most studied facial expression processing

variables. Subgroup analysis was
performed to identify altered perceptions
according to the facial expressions of four
emotions—happiness, sadness, fear, and
anger—used to examine insomnia and
emotion recognition. The pooled standard
mean differences (SMDs) and
corresponding 95% confidence intervals
(CIs) demonstrated that facial expression
recognition among people with insomnia
was less accurate (SMD = −0.30; 95% CI:
−0.46, −0.14) and slower (SMD = 0.67;
95% CI: 0.18, −1.15) compared to good
sleepers. The classification ACC of fearful
expression was lower in the insomnia
group (SMD = −0.66; 95% CI: −1.02,
−0.30). This meta-analysis was registered
using PROSPERO.
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1

DT and VS contributed equally to this

work.
∗

The most important references are denoted

by an asterisk.

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