Impaired emotional memory dissipation in insomnia disorder.
Shengzi Zeng1,2,3, Hao Fong Sit1, Xiao Li1
1Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Psychological Medicine
|September 1, 2025
Summary
Individuals with insomnia disorder show impaired emotional memory dissipation over time, retaining both memory content and affect. Sleep (SWS and REM) is crucial for adaptive emotional memory processing in healthy individuals.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Sleep Science
- Cognitive Psychology
Background:
- Insomnia disorder is linked to disrupted sleep and altered emotional memory processing.
- The long-term evolution of emotional memories in insomnia remains poorly understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the time-dependent changes in emotional memory and its neural correlates in insomnia disorder.
- To compare emotional memory processing between individuals with insomnia disorder and healthy controls.
Main Methods:
- Electroencephalography (EEG) was used to record brain activity during emotional memory encoding, sleep, and retrieval phases.
- Participants included 34 individuals with insomnia disorder and 35 healthy controls.
- Retrieval occurred immediately post-encoding, post-sleep, and after a 7-day delay.
Main Results:
- Healthy controls showed adaptive memory and affect dissipation over time, unlike individuals with insomnia.
- Insomnia disorder was associated with persistent emotional memory content and affective tone.
- Neural representations of emotion remained stable over time only in the insomnia group.
- Sleep (SWS and REM) duration predicted adaptive emotional memory dissipation in healthy controls but not in the insomnia group.
Conclusions:
- Insomnia disorder is characterized by aberrant emotional memory processing, including impaired dissipation.
- Slow-wave sleep (SWS) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep play a vital role in adaptive emotional memory consolidation and forgetting.
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