Exploring the Impact of Sleep on Emotion Regulation Across the Life Span (2024)
Undergraduate: Jennifer Fan
Faculty Advisor: Kristen Lindquist
Department: Psychology and Neuroscience
When faced with an emotion-eliciting scenario, individuals can alter its meaning and their resulting emotional response via emotion regulation. Sleep impacts emotion regulation ability, though it is unclear how these relationships evolve over the lifespan. The present study aims to investigate relationships between sleep quality, emotion regulation, and age. It utilizes existing data from an ongoing study exploring the neurobiological basis of affective aging across the life span (ages 18-80). The sleep quality of 33 participants was gauged using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). Affective ratings after an emotion regulation task and connectivity between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex (PFC) during the task were used to gauge emotion regulation success. Linear regression analyses found a significant effect of age in predicting emotion regulation ability as measured behaviorally by post-emotion regulation affect ratings, where older age was associated with worse emotion regulation ability (p = 0.042). Moreover, there was a marginally significant interaction between sleep quality and age whereby poor sleep had a more negative impact on emotion regulation for older adults than younger adults (p = 0.073). Interestingly, neither sleep quality nor age predicted PFC-amygdala connectivity, a circuit that is commonly associated with emotion regulation. These results suggest that the ability to regulate emotion decreases with age and highlight the importance of good quality sleep for adequate emotion regulation for older adults.