Abstract
Although we know that emotional events enjoy a privileged status in our memories, we still have much to learn about how emotional memories are processed, stored, and how they change over time. Here we show a positive association between REM sleep and the selective consolidation of central, negative aspects of complex scenes. Moreover, we show that the placement of sleep is critical for this selective emotional memory benefit. When testing occurred 24 h post-encoding, subjects who slept soon after learning (24 h Sleep First group) had superior memory for emotional objects compared to subjects whose sleep was delayed for 16 h post-encoding following a full day of wakefulness (24 h Wake First group). However, this increase in memory for emotional objects corresponded with a decrease in memory for the neutral backgrounds on which these objects were placed. Furthermore, memory for emotional objects in the 24 h Sleep First group was comparable to performance after just a 12 h delay containing a night of sleep, suggesting that sleep soon after learning selectively stabilizes emotional memory. These results suggest that the sleeping brain preserves in long-term memory only what is emotionally salient and perhaps most adaptive to remember.
Highlights
Emotional memories form the core of our personal histories
The field of emotional memory research is growing rapidly, but there is still much to learn about how memories for emotional events are processed, stored, and how they change over time (Payne and Kensinger, 2010)
Substantial evidence suggests that the offline brain state of sleep provides ideal conditions for memory consolidation and transformation, considerably less work has examined sleep’s role in emotional memory formation
Summary
Emotional memories form the core of our personal histories. They shape our personalities by representing our greatest achievements and our worst defeats, mark the milestones in our changing lives, and figure prominently in anxiety and mood disorders (see Payne et al, 2004; Kensinger, 2009; Brewin et al, 2010 for review). Several studies demonstrate that sleep preferentially enhances emotional episodic memories over neutral ones When presented with both negative arousing and neutral information as part of the same learning experience, subjects who sleep between training and test preferentially consolidate negative over neutral narratives (Wagner et al, 2001, 2006), pictures (Hu et al, 2006), and components of scenes (Payne and Kensinger, 2010 for review). As compared to a 30-min control group, those who slept showed selective memory benefits for the emotional objects, but showed no corresponding benefit for their backgrounds or for either the objects or the backgrounds composing neutral scenes Those who stayed awake, on the other hand, showed poorer memory for all elements as compared to those tested after a 30-min delay. Depriving rats of REM sleep can lead to performance deficits in avoidance tasks, if the deprivation occurs within so-called “REM-windows” (Smith and Butler, 1982; Smith, 1995; Smith and Rose, 1996)
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