Sleep strongly 'protects' emotional memories

Washington, Jan 18 (ANI): Sleep helps the brain to protect emotional memories, suggest researchers.

Sleep researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have for the first time suggested that a person's emotional response after witnessing an unsettling picture or traumatic event is greatly reduced if the person stays awake afterward, and that sleep strongly "protects" the negative emotional response.

Further, if the unsettling picture is viewed again or a flashback memory occurs, it will be just as upsetting as the first time for those who have slept after viewing compared to those who have not.

UMass Amherst neuroscientists Rebecca Spencer, Bengi Baran and colleagues say this response could make sense from an evolutionary point of view, because it would provide survival value to our ancestors by preserving very negative emotions and memories of life-threatening situations and a strong to incentive to avoid similar occasions in the future.

"Today, our findings have significance for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, or those asked to give eye-witness testimony in court cases," Spencer said.

"We found that if you see something disturbing, let's say an accident scene, and then you have a flashback or you're asked to look at a picture of the same scene later, your emotional response is greatly reduced, that is you'll find the scene far less upsetting, if you stayed awake after the original event than if you slept.

"It's interesting to note that it is common to be sleep-deprived after witnessing a traumatic scene, almost as if your brain doesn't want to sleep on it," she stated.

In their experiments involving 68 healthy female and 38 male (total 106) young adults between 18 and 30 years old, Spencer and colleagues set out to explore, among other ideas, an assumption that the well-known enhancement of memory that occurs during sleep is tied to a change in emotional response to the memory.

Further, in a subset of subjects the neuroscientists used a polysomnograph with electrodes attached to subjects' scalps as they slept, to investigate whether dreaming or other brain processes that occur during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep periods may play a role in the processing of emotions.

In the two-phase experiment, participants were shown pictures on a computer screen and asked to rate each one as sad or happy as well as their own response as calm or excited to each, on a scale of 1-9.

Twelve hours later, participants were shown a mix of new and already viewed pictures and asked whether they had ever seen the picture before and to rate each again on the two scales.

Spencer and colleagues found that sleep had significant effects on participants' memories and feelings. Recognition memory for the pictures was better following sleep compared with wake.

Importantly, the researchers found that contrary to previous assumptions that sleep might soften negative emotional effects of a disturbing event, a period of sleep was associated with participants' maintaining the strength of their initial negative feelings compared to a period of wakefulness.

This suggests that sleep's effect on memory and emotion are independent, the authors stated.

The study is reported in the current issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. (ANI)