Abstract
Positive affect, negative affect, and emotion regulation strategies are related to sleep quality. Emotion regulation can also act as either a protective factor against the development of psychopathologies, or as a risk factor for their development, and therefore may be one mechanism linking mental health and sleep. However, currently it is not known whether affect can mediate the impact of emotion regulation strategy use on sleep quality. An opportunity sample in a healthy population completed the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule providing measures of positive and negative affect, the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index providing a measure of sleep quality, and the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire to record habitual use of emotion regulation strategies. Data were analysed using regression and mediation analyses. Negative affect and expressive suppression were positively correlated with PSQI score suggesting that as negative affect and expressive suppression use increased, sleep quality decreased. Positive affect was negatively correlated with PSQI score suggesting that as positive affect increased sleep quality improved. Further, mediation analyses revealed that both positive affect and negative affect mediated the impact of expressive suppression on sleep quality. Moreover, this partial mediation provides the first description that the influences of affect and expressive suppression on sleep quality are at least partially distinct. Targeting improvements in negative affect and effective emotion regulation strategy use may improve the efficacy of interventions aimed at improving sleep quality and the reduction in symptomology in psychopathologies.
Highlights
Sleep is essential for health and is related to cognitive performance, emotion regulation (ER) and quality of life [1]
Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was used to assess normality suggesting that PSQI scores were not Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index Emotion Regulation Scale Cognitive Reappraisal subscale Emotion Regulation Scale Expressive Suppression subscale Positive and Negative Affect Schedule Positive Affect subscale Positive and Negative Affect Schedule Negative Affect subscale
Positive affect was negatively correlated with PSQI score, rs [87] = −0.305, p = 0.002, demonstrating that greater levels of positive affect were related to improved sleep quality
Summary
Sleep is essential for health and is related to cognitive performance, emotion regulation (ER) and quality of life [1]. Poor sleep quality is linked to impaired emotional functioning and dysregulated ER which may lead to the development of depressive symptoms [4]. For individuals with insomnia and major depressive disorder, the treatment of insomnia with cognitive behavioral insomnia therapy has been shown to improve depressive symptoms even without simultaneous antidepressant pharmacotherapy [11]. Impaired sleep quality has been shown to influence emotional reactivity to everyday events in healthy individuals and those with minor or major unipolar depression. Adopting an experience sampling method allowing emotional reactivity to daily events to be recorded throughout participants’ daily life, sleep difficulties were associated with enhanced negative affect to unpleasant events and a reduced response to neutral events. In individuals with unipolar depression, sleep difficulties were associated with increased negative affect for all everyday events [12]
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