RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Local increases in sleep-like activity predict the occurrence of emotion suppression failures
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.08.04.235978
DO 10.1101/2020.08.04.235978
A1 Avvenuti, Giulia
A1 Bertelloni, Davide
A1 Lettieri, Giada
A1 Ricciardi, Emiliano
A1 Cecchetti, Luca
A1 Pietrini, Pietro
A1 Bernardi, Giulio
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/08/05/2020.08.04.235978.abstract
AB Emotion self-regulation relies both on cognitive and behavioral strategies implemented to modulate the subjective experience and/or the behavioral expression of a given emotion. While it is known that a network encompassing fronto-cingulate and parietal brain areas is engaged during successful emotion regulation, the functional mechanisms underlying failures in emotion suppression are still unclear. In order to investigate this issue, we analyzed video and high-density EEG recordings of nineteen healthy adult subjects during an emotion suppression (ES) and a free expression (FE) task performed on two consecutive days. Changes in facial expression during ES, but not FE, were preceded by local increases in sleep-like activity (1-4Hz) in in brain areas responsible for emotional suppression, including bilateral anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex, and in right middle/inferior frontal gyrus (p<0.05, corrected). Moreover, shorter sleep duration the night prior to the ES experiment correlated with the number of behavioral errors (p=0.01) and tended to be associated with higher frontal sleep-like activity during emotion suppression failures (p=0.05). These results indicate that local sleep-like activity may represent the cause of emotion suppression failures in humans, and may offer a functional explanation for previous observations linking lack of sleep, changes in frontal activity and emotional dysregulation.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.