Does emotion regulation explains the impact of emotion on sleep physiology? Experiential versus cognitive emotion regulation

Abstract

Introduction: Despite a history of interest in emotion regulation (ER)as well as the mechanisms that regulate sleep, the relationship between the role of the emotional brain and sleep remains a challenging area of research. In the present talk we discuss the question whether trained experiential or cognitive emotion regulation can decrease the negative impact of emotional stress on sleep physiology. Methods: Two studies on trained ER will be discussed:1). on experiential versus cognitive analytical processing as ER(N=28),2). on experiential ER versus cognitive reappraisal as ER (N=38). Results: The first study revealed that participants who were instructed to apply experiential ER showed less fragmentation of sleep than participants who were instructed to apply an analytical processing approach of ER. The use of experiential ER resulted in a longer sleep time, higher sleep efficiency, fewer awakenings, less %time awake, and fewer minutes wake after sleep onset. In the second study we only found less awakenings in the experiential condition relative to cognitive reappraisal and better mood on the next morning in the experiential condition when alexithymia was taken into account. Implications of the differential effects of these two forms of emotion regulation on sleep will be discussed. Disclosure: Nothing to disclos