\u201cThe study of how sleep helps us remember and process emotional information is still young,\u201d says Alexis Chambers of the University of Notre Dame. Past work has focused on the role of negative memories for sleep, in particular how insomnia is a healthy biological response for people to reduce negative memories and emotions associated with a traumatic event.<\/p>\n Two new studies presented this week at a meeting of cognitive neuroscientists in Chicago are exploring the flip side: how sleep treats the positive. \u201cOnly if we investigate all the possibilities within this field will we ever fully understand the processes underlying our sleep, memory, and emotions,\u201d Chambers says.<\/p>\n Protecting the positive<\/strong><\/p>\n To test how sleep affects positive memories, Rebecca Spencer of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her colleagues split 70 young adults into two groups, one that got to sleep overnight and one that had to stay awake. Both groups viewed images of positive items, such as puppies and flowers, and neutral items, such as furniture or dinner plates. The researchers then tested the participants’ memories of and emotional reactions to the images 12 hours later, after either the period of sleep or wake.<\/p>\n They found that \u201csleep enhances our emotionally positive memories while these memories decay over wake<\/strong>,\u201d Spencer says. \u201cPositive memories may even be prioritized for processing during sleep<\/strong>.\u201d But while people remembered the positive images more than the neutral ones, their emotional response to the positive images did not change over sleep versus wake. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if you went to sleep or stayed awake \u2013 what you thought was a \u20189′ \u2013 really great \u2013 you still think is a \u20189\u2019,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n The results, she says, could have significant implications for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, as using wakefulness could have the unintended effect of degrading of positive memories in addition to negative memories<\/strong>. \u201cIt suggests that insomnia should be treated at some point after a traumatic event \u2013 perhaps a few days\/weeks depending on the level of trauma \u2013 so that these positive memories can be strengthened and eventually outweigh the negative,\u201d Spencer says.<\/p>\n The study also reinforces the idea that with the standard ups and downs of our days, we should sleep to enhance our memories<\/strong>. \u201cFor mildly negative memories, we can learn something from them and we should remember them,\u201dshe says. \u201cMoreover, sleep enhances memories for the positive events that we are exposed to and want to remember.\u201d<\/p>\n From an evolutionary perspective, sleep’s role in protecting both positive and negative memories helps us to analyze and predict future events, Spencer says. People need to remember both the people and events that gave them bad experiences, as well as those that helped them and gave them good experiences.<\/p>\n Make Them Laugh<\/strong><\/p>\n In another study, Chambers of the University of Notre Dame and colleagues, working under her adviser Jessica Payne, wanted to test if they could enhance positive memories over sleep by adding the element of humor. Chambers’ team took Farside cartoons and showed both the originals and altered non-humorous versions to 66 participants before and after a period of wake or sleep. While participants more easily recalled the humorous versions of the cartoons, sleep had no effect on the type of cartoon recalled.<\/p>\n The fact that sleep did not impact such memories suggests something important about humor as a memory aid, Chambers says. \u201cSleep may be thought of as a way of aiding most memories since a period of sleep after learning is typically better for subsequent memory than a period of wake,\u201d she says \u201cSimilarly, humor may serve as a different, but possibly equal, aid for subsequent memory. Both methods help us remember things better in the future, but it appears that they work in independent ways.\u201d<\/p>\n Because there was an overall enhancement of memory for humorous over non-humorous cartoons, Chambers says, \u201cit does appear that there is something about positive experiences that is worth remembering.\u201d Echoing Spencer’s comments: \u201cIt could be that preserving such memories is adaptive to us, similar to the suggested survival value of preserving memories of negative experiences, such as a deadly snake to be avoided in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n Both studies \u2013 \u201cEffects of Sleep on Memory and Reactivity for Positive Emotional Pictures,\u201d by Rebecca Spencer et al., and \u201cLaugh Yourself to Sleep: The Role of Humor in the Investigation of Sleep\u2019s effects on Positive Memory\u201d by Alexis Chambers et al. \u2013 will be presented in posters at the 19th annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS).\u00a0 More than 1400 scientists are in attendance at the meeting in Chicago, IL, from March 31 to April 4, 2012.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Cognitive Neuroscience Society press release: Sleep plays a powerful role in preserving our memories. But while recent research shows that wakefulness may cloud memories of negative or traumatic… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,4],"tags":[92,12,23,362,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2270"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2270"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2271,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2270\/revisions\/2271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Sleep2.jpg\" "\\"sleep\\"")
Sleep plays a powerful role in preserving our memories<\/strong>. But while recent research shows that wakefulness may cloud memories of negative or traumatic events, a new study has found that wakefulness also degrades positive memories<\/strong>. Sleep, it seems, protects positive memories just as it does negative ones, and that has important implications for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder<\/strong>.<\/p>\n