This review provides a synthesis of these findings, describing an intimate relationship between sleep, emotional brain function, and clinical mood disorders and offers a tentative first theoretical framework that may account for these observed interactions.
Sleep is strongly conserved within species, yet marked and perplexing inter-individual differences in sleep physiology are observed. Combining EEG sleep recordings and high-resolution structural brain imaging, here we demonstrate that the morphology of the human brain offers one explanatory factor of such inter-individual variability.
Substantive evidence now indicates a proactive role for sleep in the consolidation of human declarative memory. However, debate continues regarding the specific sleep stages and brain oscillations supporting these modifications and the qualitative nature of this declarative memory benefit.
On the basis of the unique neurobiology of sleep, the authors outline a model describing the overnight modulation of affective neural systems and the (re)processing of recent emotional experiences, both of which appear to redress the appropriate next-day reactivity of limbic and associated autonomic networks.
Rapidly emerging evidence continues to describe an intimate and causal relationship between sleep and affective brain regulation.
Investigate the impact of sleep deprivation on the ability to recognize the intensity of human facial emotions.
Clinical evidence suggests a potentially causal interaction between sleep and affective brain function; nearly all mood disorders display co-occurring sleep abnormalities, commonly involving rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep. Building on this clinical evidence, recent neurobiological frameworks have hypothesized a benefit of REM sleep in palliatively decreasing next-day brain reactivity to recent waking emotional experiences.
Numerous studies have shown that sleep enhances memory for motor skills learned through practice. Motor skills can, however, also be learned through observation, a process possibly involving the mirror neuron system. We investigated whether motor skill enhancement through prior observation requires sleep to follow the observation, either immediately or after a delay, to consolidate the procedural memory.
