Publications by authors named "Tony J Cunningham"

Article Synopsis
  • - This study looks at how sleep disturbances affect emotional well-being daily, with a focus on how exercise and social interaction might play a role in this relationship.
  • - Using data from 455 participants over 20 days, researchers found that better sleep efficiency leads to more positive feelings and less negative feelings, while poor sleep quality has the opposite effect.
  • - The study revealed that exercise can help lessen the negative impact of bad sleep on emotions, while more social interaction can enhance the benefits of good sleep on emotional health.
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Emotional memory bias is a common characteristic of internalizing symptomatology and is enhanced during sleep. The current study employs bifactor S-1 modeling to disentangle depression-specific anhedonia, anxiety-specific anxious arousal, and the common internalizing factor, general distress, and test whether these internalizing symptoms interact with sleep to influence memory for emotional and neutral information. Healthy adults (N = 281) encoded scenes featuring either negative objects (e.

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Sleep is a vital restorative process that has occupied our curiosity for millennia. Despite our longstanding research efforts, the biology of sleep and its connection to mental states remains enigmatic. Unsurprisingly, sleep and wakefulness, the fundamental processes between which our mental states oscillate, are inseparable from our physical and mental health.

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Sleep benefits memory consolidation. However, factors present at initial encoding may moderate this effect. Here, we examined the role that encoding strategy plays in subsequent memory consolidation during sleep.

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The failure to retain memory for extinguished fear plays a major role in the maintenance of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with successful extinction recall necessary for symptom reduction. Disturbed sleep, a hallmark symptom of PTSD, impairs fear extinction recall. However, our understanding of the electrophysiological mechanisms underpinning sleep's role in extinction retention remains underdetermined.

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The Personality Inventory for , Brief Form (PID-5-BF) was developed with an assumption of invariance across sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals. This assumption has yet to be tested empirically. Using multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, we examined measurement invariance in the PID-5-BF across the SGM status in clinical ( = 1,174; = 254 SGM) and nonclinical ( = 1,456; = 151 SGM) samples.

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Recently, there has been increasing attention to the interaction between empathy and memory. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period when empathy played a key role in people's behaviors, we assessed the relationship between empathy and memory. In this pre-registered report, we used memory accuracy for the number of COVID-19 cases as a measure of recent memory and examined its relationship with trait empathy.

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Article Synopsis
  • Cancer survivors often struggle with insomnia and depression, which are linked according to the Integrated Sleep and Reward (ISR) Model, highlighting the importance of reward processing in these conditions.
  • A pilot randomized controlled trial tested the effects of a 4-session virtual cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) on cancer survivors, focusing on changes in anticipatory and consummatory pleasure alongside depression symptoms.
  • Results indicated that CBT-I helped maintain anticipatory pleasure levels, which were positively associated with reductions in insomnia severity, supporting the ISR Model and suggesting that enhancing pleasure could be a key strategy in treating insomnia and depression in cancer survivors.*
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The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic had a profound impact on sleep and psychological well-being for individuals worldwide. This pre-registered investigation extends our prior study by tracking self-reported social jetlag (SJL), social sleep restriction (SSR), and perceived life stress from May 2020 through October 2021. Using web-based surveys, we collected self-reported sleep information with the Ultrashort Munich Chronotype Questionnaire at three additional timepoints (September 2020, February 2021 and October 2021).

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In addition to showing greater memory positivity soon after negative events, older adults can be more likely than younger adults to show decreases in memory negativity as events grow more distant. We recently showed that this latter effect was not present when adults were asked to rate memories of the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (March-May 2020): after a short (June/July 2020) and long delay (October/November 2020), older age was associated with greater reflections on positive aspects, but with no difference in negative aspects. We suggested that older adults did not show decreased negativity because the pandemic was still prevalent in their daily lives.

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Objectives: Major sociopolitical events can influence the general public's affective state and other affect-related processes, such as sleep. Here, we investigated the extent that the 2020 US presidential election impacted sleep, public mood, and alcohol consumption. We also explored the relationship between affect and sleep changes during the peak period of election stress.

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A growing body of evidence suggests that sleep is critical for the adaptive processing and consolidation of emotional information into long-term memory. Previous research has indicated that emotional components of scenes particularly benefit from sleep in healthy groups, yet sleep-dependent emotional memory processes remain unexplored in clinical cohorts, including those with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). This line of research is important as it will add to the understanding of how disrupted sleep in OSA contributes to both impaired cognition and emotion dysregulation.

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The COVID-19 pandemic provided the opportunity to determine whether age-related differences in utilitarian moral decision-making during sacrificial moral dilemmas extend to non-sacrificial dilemmas in real-world settings. As affect and emotional memory are associated with moral and prosocial behaviors, we also sought to understand how these were associated with moral behaviors during the 2020 spring phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Older age, higher negative affect, and greater reports of reflecting on negative aspects of the pandemic were associated with higher reported purchase of hard-to-find goods, while older age and higher negative affect alone were associated with higher reported purchase of hard-to-find medical supplies.

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For two decades, sleep has been touted as one of the primary drivers for the encoding, consolidation, retention, and retrieval of episodic emotional memory. Recently, however, sleep's role in emotional memory processing has received renewed scrutiny as meta-analyses and reviews have indicated that sleep may only contribute a small effect that hinges on the content or context of the learning and retrieval episodes. On the one hand, the strong perception of sleep's importance in maintaining memory for emotional events may have been exacerbated by publication bias phenomena, such as the "winner's curse" and "file drawer problem.

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Despite initial concerns about older adult's emotional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic, reports from the first months of the pandemic suggested that older adults were faring better than younger adults, reporting lower stress, negative affect, depression, and anxiety. In this study, we examined whether this pattern would persist as the pandemic progressed. A convenience sample of 1,171 community-dwelling adults in the United States, ages 18-90, filled out surveys on various metrics of emotional well-being starting in March 2020 and at various time points through April 2021.

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Background: For cancer survivors, insomnia is prevalent, distressing, and persists for years if unmanaged. Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is an effective treatment yet can be difficult to access and may require modification to address survivorship-specific barriers to sleep. In this 2-phase study, the authors adapted and assessed the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary effects of synchronous, virtual CBT-I adapted for cancer survivors (the Survivorship Sleep Program [SSP]).

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Sleep disturbances are common in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), although which sleep microarchitectural characteristics reliably classify those with and without PTSD remains equivocal. Here, we investigated sleep microarchitectural differences (i.e.

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Social restrictions necessary to reduce the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) profoundly changed how we socialised, worked and, for students, attended classes. Interestingly, significant sleep pattern shifts occurred in the context of pandemic-related social restrictions. Whether age and chronotype influenced these sleep pattern changes remains poorly understood.

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The initial phase of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic changed our lives dramatically, with stay-at-home orders and extreme physical distancing requirements. The present study suggests that how adults remember these disruptions depends, in part, on their age. In two surveys collected from American and Canadian participants during Summer 2020 (n = 551) and Fall 2020 (n = 506), older age (across ages 18-90 years) was associated with greater reflections on positive aspects of the initial phase of the pandemic.

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Prospective memory involves setting an intention to act that is maintained over time and executed when appropriate. Slow wave sleep (SWS) has been implicated in maintaining prospective memories, although which SWS oscillations most benefit this memory type remains unclear. Here, we investigated SWS spectral power correlates of prospective memory.

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Objectives: Previous literature suggests age-related increases in prosociality. Does such an age-prosociality relationship occur during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, or might the pandemic-as a stressor that may differently influence young and older adults-create a boundary condition on the relationship? If so, can empathy, a well-known prosocial disposition, explain the age-prosociality relationship? This study investigated these questions and whether the target (distant others compared to close others) of prosocial behaviors differs by age.

Methods: Participants completed a series of surveys on dispositional empathy and prosocial behaviors for a study assessing their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Advanced age is often associated with increased emotional well-being, with older adults reporting more positive and less negative affect than younger adults. Here, we test whether this pattern held during the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic that disproportionately put older adults at risk. We additionally examine potential moderating effects of daily activity and social connectedness, which have been shown to benefit mental health across the life span.

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Sleep is one of the pillars of health. Experimental models of acute sleep loss, of chronic partial sleep deprivation, and of sleep fragmentation in healthy sleepers are helpful models of sleep deficiency produced by insufficient sleep duration, sleep timing, and sleep disorders. Sleep deficiency is associated with changes in markers associated with risk for disease.

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