[thedoc (OP)]

Contrary to the prevailing view - scientists find that sleep can reinforce unpleasant memories. Remaining awake, on the other hand, helps you to forget...

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[hannahcritchlow]

A listener got in touch after hearing this story saying:

Hello ,
 
In the news section of the 22nd Jan 2012 podcast , there is an article that talks about sleep and emotions or memories .
 
newbielink:http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/news-archive/news/2470/ [nonactive]
 
But I have previously read an article on a website about the same subject
 
newbielink:http://sciencenetlinks.com/science-news/science-updates/dreams-emotions/ [nonactive]
 
and I’m really confused .
 
I’m sorry , I’m not an expert or something . I did not understand the whole thing
 
and I just thought you might help me .
 
 By the way , I’m new to The Naked Scientists podcast and I like it very much
 
I would be grateful if you could respond to my message .
 
Thanks
4-3-2012

We asked Rebecca Spencer, lead author of the study and she replied:

Hi Hannah,

The simplest answer is that we measure something totally different.  We're most interested in how sleep changes emotion on a negative to neutral to positive scale, in other words, how emotionally negative is it.  The type if emotion (neg, pos, neutral) is ignored in Walker's work instead the rate just "intensity" regardless of emotion type.  Note that Walker also did not measure the relationship with memory either even though his model makes predictions regarding the interaction of memory and emotionality changes.

The perhaps more complicated part of the answer is that in addition to measuring subjective valence (negative->neutral) we measured arousal.  We saw no sleep effects on arousal yet this measure should most closely match Walker's measure if "intensity".  If it's the case that these capture the same construct, then I would turn to analytical or methodological differences across our studies.  They analyzed their data in an much different......way too.  For this reason, you will see a link to supplementary materials at the end of our paper.  In these materials, we plot our data using their approach and we still don't agree.  So then you could turn to methodological differences.  If I remember right (I don't have the Walker paper with me) they combine negative and positive images and we know how you process a negative item in a positive context will be different than if just paired with neutrals  They also use stimuli of a much different range of valence and arousal (if I remember right, much more mild than ours). 

All in all, it's up to both of our labs to continue to sort this out and I do believe we will! 

I hope this helps!

Rebecca

So they are measuring different things, hence they get different results. The relationship between sleep, emotion and memory is an area of great interest to neuroscientists, mainly because it is such a puzzle, something that they are trying to understand more about.

Looking at differences in results from studies employing different paradigms will, hopefully, help to tease out our eventual full understanding of the area.

Hannah