Abstract Introduction While sleep disruption is linked to maladaptive processing of emotional information, the mechanisms through which emotion regulation strategies influence subsequent memory, especially among those who suffer from chronic sleep disturbance, remains poorly understood. This ongoing study examined how different emotion regulation strategies affect memory for aversive stimuli in (1) healthy individuals following multiple nights of normal sleep or sleep restriction and (2) patients diagnosed with insomnia disorder. Methods Seventeen healthy controls completed a normal-sleep protocol (HCNS), and 17 healthy participants completed a sleep-restriction protocol involving 4-hour sleep per night for three consecutive nights in hospital settings (HCSR). Ten patients with insomnia disorder (ID) completed the same protocol as the HCNS group. After sleep manipulation, participants completed an emotion regulation task involving maintain, suppression, and reappraisal conditions for 60 highly aversive images. This was followed by a surprise recognition memory test including the previously encoded images and 60 novel foils. Recognition accuracy for old and new images was calculated separately. Results For old images, we found a significant main effect of Condition (maintain vs. suppression vs. reappraisal), p = 0.026. Pairwise comparisons suggested that participants recalled reappraised images significantly better than suppressed images. This effect was primarily driven by the HCNS group; however, the Group × Condition interaction was not significant (p = .412). There were no significant group differences in recognition accuracy for new images (p = .885). Conclusion Preliminary analyses suggest that emotion regulation strategy influences memory for negative images, with reappraisal enhancing subsequent recognition relative to suppression. Although this effect appeared most pronounced in healthy individuals with normal sleep, neither chronic nor protocol-induced sleep loss significantly altered the overall pattern of memory modulation. These findings remain provisional, and final conclusions will be drawn upon completion of data collection (target N = 25 per group). Support (if any) This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health through a K23 award to Dr. Tony Cunningham (K23MH127464).
Zeng et al. (Fri,) studied this question.