In one recent study with eight-to-11-year-olds, Bolinger and colleagues showed children both negative and neutral pictures. The children reported their emotional response using stick figures corresponding to how they felt. Then some of the children slept. Others did not. The researchers monitored their brain physiology via electrodes from the next room. The next morning, the kids saw the same pictures, plus some new ones. And compared to the children who stayed awake, children who slept were better able to control their emotional responses.
And a recent paper co-authored by Spencer appears to be the first to show that naps, and not just overnight sleep, contribute to emotional memory processing in children. Without a nap, children showed a bias toward emotional faces. With a nap, they exhibited what Spencer calls the "cool as a cucumber" effect, where they responded similarly to neutral stimuli as to emotional stimuli. In essence, “kids are really emotional without naps, and they’re hypersensitive to emotional stimuli”, she says – because they haven’t consolidated the emotional baggage from earlier that day.
Spencer believes that naps are also helpful for emotional processing in adults, though not to the same extent. An adult has a more mature hippocampus, and thus a stronger ability to hold onto memories.
Interestingly, older adults show a bias towards positive memories while young adults skew negative. That may be because it’s adaptive for children and teenagers to focus on negative experiences, because that contains key information that needs to be learned: from the dangers of fire to the risks of accepting a drink from a stranger. But towards the end of life, people prioritise the positives. They also get less REM sleep – the kind of sleep most likely to entrench negative memories, especially in people with depression.
So sometimes it can actually be a good thing that REM sleep deprivation harms the brain’s ability to consolidate emotional memories. “There’s good evidence that people who have longer REM sleep tend to be more depressed,” Durrant says. He believes that this is because a subset of people with depression are re-consolidating negative memories during REM sleep.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181009-how-sleep-helps-with-emotional-recovery-and-trauma
No comments:
Post a Comment
Due to a small but consistent influx of spam, comments will now be checked before publishing. Only egregious spam/illegal/racist crap will be disapproved, everything else will be published.