Schedule of Events | Symposia

Symposium Session 3 - Healing While Sleeping? How sleep shapes our emotional experiences

Symposium Session 3: Sunday, March 30, 2025, 1:30 – 3:30 pm EDT, Constitution A

Chairs: Xiaoqing Hu¹, Jessica Payne²; ¹The University of Hong Kong, ²University of Notre Dame
Presenters: Jessica Payne, Tony J. Cunningham, Dan Denis, Ryan Bottary, Elizabeth A. Kensinger, Shengzi Zeng, Robert Stickgold, Lucia Talamini, Xiaoqing Hu, Tao Xia, Ziqing Yao, Danni Chen

While it is well-established that sleep plays an important role in re-processing emotional memories, significant questions remain to be addressed. Specifically, to which extent does sleep prioritize the consolidation of emotional over neutral memories; how does sleep differentially impact the affect tones and memory contents of emotional experiences; what are the roles of non-rapid-eye-movement and rapid-eye-movement; how can we manipulate the reactivation and consolidation of emotional memories during sleep. In this symposium, we present new results advancing our understanding of these questions. Talks in this symposium employ various experimental methods and assessments to address these outstanding questions, including sleep deprivation, closed-loop stimulation, targeted memory reactivation, and stress-related hormones. We will present evidence on how stress and its related hormones "tag" emotional memories for subsequent consolidation; how sleep deprivation and subsequent recovery sleep influence the consolidation of emotional and neutral memory components; how closed-loop auditory stimulation during rapid-eye-movement sleep would influence fear memories; how targeted memory reactivation during non-rapid-eye-movement sleep would weaken older aversive memories. Collectively, these findings advance theoretical models of sleep-dependent memory consolidation, and how sleep interventions can be developed to achieve better mental health outcomes.

Presentations

Stress Interacts with Sleep to Selectively Consolidate Negative Emotional Memory

Jessica Payne¹; ¹University of Notre Dame

Elevated stress hormones (e.g., cortisol and norepinephrine) can selectively benefit the consolidation of emotional memories, as can the occurrence of sleep shortly after learning. I will discuss evidence, from behavioral, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging studies, suggesting that stress and arousal interact with sleep to augment memory consolidation, particularly for emotionally negative information, as well as how these relationships might change with age. I will present a model arguing that stress hormones help ‘tag’ emotional information as important to remember at the time of encoding, thus enabling subsequent, sleep-based plasticity processes to optimally consolidate emotional information in a selective manner.

The Differential Impact of Sleep Loss and Recovery Sleep on Memory for Emotional and Neutral Scene Components

Tony J. Cunningham^1,2, Dan Denis³, Ryan Bottary⁴, Elizabeth A. Kensinger⁵, Shengzi Zeng^1,2, Robert Stickgold^1,2; ¹Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, ²Harvard Medical School, ³University of York, ⁴Widener University, ⁵Boston College

Sleep has long been lauded as a primary driver of successfully processing episodic emotional memories, elevating them above neutral content in our memory stores. However, a recent slew of reviews and meta-analyses have revealed a lack of consistency for this effect in the literature, and that sleep’s influence may be relatively small, hinging on the context or content of the encoding and retrieval episodes. In this talk, potential “boundary conditions” of this effect will be discussed with special attention paid to potential areas of future research. Further, as a demonstration of the importance of the positioning of sleep and sleep loss across the stages of memory processing, results from a recent study investigating the effects of total sleep deprivation (TSD) prior to encoding and recovery sleep during early consolidation of emotional and neutral memory components will be discussed. Briefly, a night of TSD significantly impaired memory for all scene components, regardless of position or valence. A period of recovery sleep during early consolidation, however, restored memory functioning such that performance on a second recognition test 4-hours later matched typically rested individuals. These results demonstrate that while there may be some conditions, sleep is distinctly involved in healthy emotional memory processing.

Phase precise REM Theta enhancement modulates emotional memory recall

Lucia Talamini¹; ¹University of Amsterdam

Closed-loop auditory stimulation (CLAS) approaches have been used extensively to investigate brain oscillations and memory consolidation, but reports are focused on non-REM sleep. For the first time, we apply a new method able to precisely model and predict EEG oscillatory dynamics and to track and phase-target theta oscillations (4-8 Hz) during human REM sleep. To further investigate the link between REM sleep, theta oscillations and emotional memory consolidation, a fear conditioning paradigm associated with a memory recollection task took place before and after a night of sleep, during which we recorded subjects‘ EEG signals. Our results shows that fear memories can be attenuated through phase auditory stimulation – highlights a promising avenue for influencing emotional memory consolidation. This finding demonstrates the potential of sleep manipulation to modulate emotional responses, offering a significant step forward in both understanding memory dynamics and advancing potential therapeutic interventions.

Updating emotional memories during human sleep

Xiaoqing Hu¹, Tao Xia¹, Ziqing Yao¹, Danni Chen¹; ¹The University of Hong Kong

Not all memories are welcome by the mind. Overconsolidated unwanted memories such as aversive or traumatic memories pose significant threats to our emotional well-being. Can we edit unwanted memories during sleep? Our recent work suggests that the sleep-mediated memory reactivation processes can be leveraged to foster positive memories and to weaken aversive memories. Via unobtrusively delivering auditory cues during non-rapid-eye-movement sleep (targeted memory reactivation), we found that both affect tones and memory contents of aversive memories can be modified. Cueing benefits are associated with cue-elicited delta/theta/sigma power, and with the coupling between slow oscillations and external emotional stimuli. These results suggest that sleep-mediated memory reactivations play adaptive roles in memory updating and even forgetting.