Cortical hyperarousal in individuals with frequent nightmares.

Nightmares are common among the general population and psychiatric patients and have been associated with signs of nocturnal arousal such as increased heart rate or increased high-frequency electroencephalographic (EEG) activity. However, it is still unclear, whether these characteristics are more of a trait occurring in people with frequent nightmares or rather indicators of the nightmare state. We compared participants with frequent nightmares (NM group; n = 30) and healthy controls (controls; n = 27) who spent 4 nights in the sleep laboratory over the course of 8 weeks.

To sleep or not to sleep, that is the question: A systematic review and meta-analysis on the effect of post-trauma sleep on intrusive memories of analog trauma.

Distressing intrusive memories of a traumatic event are one of the hallmark symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. Thus, it is crucial to identify early interventions that prevent the occurrence of intrusive memories. Both, sleep and sleep deprivation have been discussed as such interventions, yet previous studies yielded contradicting effects.

The circadian neurobiology of reward.

Circadian clocks are important regulators of physiology and behavior. In the brain, circadian clocks have been described in many centers of the central reward system. They affect neurotransmitter signaling, neuroendocrine circuits, and the sensitivity to external stimulation.

Sleep's role in updating aversive autobiographical memories.

Aversive autobiographical memories play a key role in the development and maintenance of many mental disorders. Imagery rescripting is a well-established psychotherapeutic intervention aiming to create a more adaptive version of an aversive memory by modifying its interpretation. Sleep has been shown to support reconsolidation of updated neutral memories.

Investigating the effect of a nap following experimental trauma on analogue PTSD symptoms.

Cognitive models assume that the incomplete integration of a traumatic experience into the autobiographical memory results in typical symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) such as intrusive re-experiencing. Sleep supports the integration of new experiences into existing memory networks through memory consolidation. In fifty-six females, we investigated whether a 90-min daytime nap (n = 33) compared to a wake period (n = 23) after being exposed to an experimental trauma (i.

The relation between sigma power and internalizing problems across development.

Internalizing problems are characterized by deficits in emotion processing and regulation. They are among the most common problems in children and adolescents and mark an increased risk for depressive and anxiety disorders in later life. First evidence suggests that sleep alterations are related to the development and/or persistence of mood and anxiety disorders in children, adolescents, and adults.

Sleep-dependent memory consolidation in children with self-limited focal epilepsies.

Objective: Children with self-limited focal epilepsies of childhood (SLFE) are known to show impaired memory functions, particularly in the verbal domain. Interictal epileptiform discharges (IED) in these epilepsies are more pronounced in nonrapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. Nonrapid eye movement sleep is crucial for consolidation of newly-encoded memories.

Selective suppression of rapid eye movement sleep increases next-day negative affect and amygdala responses to social exclusion.

Healthy sleep, positive general affect, and the ability to regulate emotional experiences are fundamental for well-being. In contrast, various mental disorders are associated with altered rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, negative affect, and diminished emotion regulation abilities. However, the neural processes mediating the relationship between these different phenomena are still not fully understood.

The Sleeping Infant Brain Anticipates Development.

From the age of 3 months, infants learn relations between objects and co-occurring words [1]. These very first representations of object-word pairings in infant memory are considered as non-symbolic proto-words comprising specific visual-auditory associations that can already be formed in the first months of life [2-5]. Genuine words that refer to semantic long-term memory have not been evidenced prior to 9 months of age [6-9].

Intranasal insulin decreases circulating cortisol concentrations during early sleep in elderly humans.

Aging is associated with increases in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity that can predispose to metabolic and cognitive impairments. We investigated in elderly and young subjects whether intranasal insulin administration to the human brain reduces early-sleep nadir concentrations of adrenocorticotropin and cortisol, that is, indicators of baseline HPA axis activity. In within-subject comparisons, intranasal insulin (160 IU) or placebo was administered to 14 elderly (mean age 70.

Targeted Reactivation during Sleep Differentially Affects Negative Memories in Socially Anxious and Healthy Children and Adolescents.

Cognitive models propose a negative memory bias as one key factor contributing to the emergence and maintenance of social anxiety disorder (SAD). The long-term consolidation of memories relies on memory reactivations during sleep. We investigated in SAD patients and healthy controls the role of memory reactivations during sleep in the long-term consolidation of positive and negative information.

Widespread reduction in sleep spindle activity in socially anxious children and adolescents.

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is one of the most prevalent psychiatric diseases typically emerging during childhood and adolescence. Biological vulnerabilities such as a protracted maturation of prefrontal cortex functioning together with heightened reactivity of the limbic system leading to increased emotional reactivity are discussed as factors contributing to the emergence and maintenance of SAD. Sleep slow wave activity (SWA, 0.

Prior knowledge is essential for the beneficial effect of targeted memory reactivation during sleep.

Prior knowledge speeds up system consolidation and accelerates integration of newly acquired memories into existing neocortical knowledge networks. By using targeted memory reactivations, we demonstrate that prior knowledge is also essential for successful reactivation and consolidation of memories during sleep, both on the behavioral and oscillatory level (i.e.

Children's initial sleep-associated changes in motor skill are unrelated to long-term skill levels.

Sleep is considered to support the formation of skill memory. In juvenile but not adult song birds learning a tutor's song, a stronger initial deterioration of song performance over night-sleep predicts better song performance in the long run. This and similar observations have stimulated the view of sleep supporting skill formation during development in an unsupervised off-line learning process that, in the absence of external feedback, can initially also enhance inaccuracies in skill performance.

Generalization of word meanings during infant sleep.

Sleep consolidates memory and promotes generalization in adults, but it is still unknown to what extent the rapidly growing infant memory benefits from sleep. Here we show that during sleep the infant brain reorganizes recent memories and creates semantic knowledge from individual episodic experiences. Infants aged between 9 and 16 months were given the opportunity to encode both objects as specific word meanings and categories as general word meanings.

Transcranial oscillatory direct current stimulation during sleep improves declarative memory consolidation in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder to a level comparable to healthy controls.

Background: Slow oscillations (<1 Hz) during slow wave sleep (SWS) promote the consolidation of declarative memory. Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have been shown to display deficits in sleep-dependent consolidation of declarative memory supposedly due to dysfunctional slow brain rhythms during SWS.

Objective: Using transcranial oscillating direct current stimulation (toDCS) at 0.

Sleep improves prospective remembering by facilitating spontaneous-associative retrieval processes.

Memories are of the past but for the future, enabling individuals to implement intended plans and actions at the appropriate time. Prospective memory is the specific ability to remember and execute an intended behavior at some designated point in the future. Although sleep is well-known to benefit the consolidation of memories for past events, its role for prospective memory is still not well understood.

Slow wave sleep induced by GABA agonist tiagabine fails to benefit memory consolidation.

Study Objectives: Slow wave sleep (SWS) plays a pivotal role in consolidating memories. Tiagabine has been shown to increase SWS in favor of REM sleep without impacting subjective sleep. However, it is unknown whether this effect is paralleled by an improved sleep-dependent consolidation of memory.

Sleep promotes consolidation of emotional memory in healthy children but not in children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Fronto-limbic brain activity during sleep is believed to support the consolidation of emotional memories in healthy adults. Attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is accompanied by emotional deficits coincidently caused by dysfunctional interplay of fronto-limbic circuits. This study aimed to examine the role of sleep in the consolidation of emotional memory in ADHD in the context of healthy development.

The sleeping child outplays the adult's capacity to convert implicit into explicit knowledge.

When sleep followed implicit training on a motor sequence, children showed greater gains in explicit sequence knowledge after sleep than adults. This greater explicit knowledge in children was linked to their higher sleep slow-wave activity and to stronger hippocampal activation at explicit knowledge retrieval. Our data indicate the superiority of children in extracting invariant features from complex environments, possibly as a result of enhanced reprocessing of hippocampal memory representations during slow-wave sleep.

Sleep to implement an intention.

Study Objectives: Sleep supports the consolidation of new memories. However, this effect has mainly been shown for memories of past events. Here we investigated the role of sleep for the implementation of intentions for the future.