0115 How Pre-Sleep Negative Affect and Rumination Impact Sleep Onset

Abstract Introduction Getting a good night’s sleep is critical to several aspects of daily functioning and health, but many choices may hinder an individual’s onset of sleep. The impact of negative emotion on subsequent sleep has received limited attention and causal claims require strong experimental methodology. One contributor to delayed sleep onset may be rumination, as ruminating individuals’ may negative emotions may persevere longer. The current study aimed to examine the impact of emotions on sleep immediately after experiencing an emotionally disturbing video and the role of individual differences, specifically rumination tendencies. Methods Using a within-subjects, at-home design, participants (N=149) encountered two nights of control videos and two nights of emotionally distressing videos immediately before their normal sleep time. Rumination tendencies were measured at baseline using the Rumination-Reflection Questionnaire by Trapnell and Campbell. Mood and negative affect were recorded before and after watching the videos and their subsequent sleep was recorded using actigraphy. Participants self-reported sleep-onset latency (SOL) in minutes. Results The manipulation was effective at inducing negative emotions including anger (d = 0.596, p 0.001), disgust (d = 1.513, p 0.001), and fear (d = 1.058, p 0.001). A paired samples t-test showed no meaningful differences on self-reported SOL between control and experimental nights (p=.596). While control nights did have a slightly higher average SOL than experimental, the averages differed by 1.1 minutes. Preliminary analysis revealed no significant correlations of rumination on experimental or control SOL, with rumination correlated to overall SOL 0.05. Conclusion Despite effective induction of pre-sleep negative affect, preliminary analyses showed there were no substantive differences between control and experimental conditions in participants’ self-reported SOL (despite adequate statistical power), although the reports may be inaccurate due to self-report biases. Future analyses of actigraphic data will evaluate more objective aspects of sleep and roles of other individual differences. Support (if any) N/A