Does emotion regulation modulate the effects of sleep disruption in the brain?

The present study aims to investigate the neurological bases of experiential versus cognitive emotion regulation in the context of sleep disruption. Currently, the connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and limbic areas during affect regulation is little understood, even less after sleep deprivation. Additionally, recent evidence shows that one night of disrupted sleep can be as detrimental to affect as one night of sleep deprivation and yields more ecological validity (Kahn et al., 2014). Participants will enroll in a sleep interruption protocol in which they will be woken up repeatedly during the night to respond to a noise stimulus, and instructed to try to resume sleep as quickly as possible. Participants will receive a training in the corresponding emotion regulation modes. After a baseline night, as well as after the sleep interruption night, participants will undergo fMRI scanning. Connectivity patterns of experiential versus cognitive emotion regulation in the brain will be determined using dynamic causal model modeling (DCM). On the basis of a process overlap framework between emotion generation and emotion regulation strategy (see also McGrae et al., 2012), we expect that neural regions active during an experiential approach will overlap more with neural limbic activations after sleep interruption while neural activations from the cognitive top down regulation should show more overlap with emotional activations after a night of healthy sleep.