Understanding the Role of Sleep in Emotional Memory and Anxiety
Recent research has uncovered a significant link between sleep, anxiety, and emotional memory processing. A study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry suggests that sleep may amplify the tendency for anxious children and young adolescents to overgeneralize negative experiences. This means that after a night’s sleep, children with higher anxiety levels are more likely to misidentify new but similar negative images as ones they have seen before.
The study was driven by the growing understanding that sleep plays a critical role in shaping emotional memories. During sleep, the brain reactivates and consolidates recent experiences, often prioritizing emotionally charged material. While this process can be adaptive, helping individuals learn from significant events, it can also become problematic when it comes to anxiety. In such cases, the brain's focus on negative experiences may lead to what researchers call negative overgeneralization—when a single unpleasant event influences how similar, harmless situations are perceived.
This research focused on late childhood and early adolescence, a period marked by heightened emotional responses, changing sleep patterns, and increasing rates of anxiety. The team wanted to explore whether anxiety interacts with sleep to alter how emotional memories are recognized and generalized during this crucial developmental stage.
“Our interest was sparked by a growing recognition that sleep plays a pivotal role in cognitive processes like memory consolidation, especially during critical neurodevelopmental periods such as early adolescence,” said Liga Eihentale, a doctoral student at Florida International University and member of the REMEDY research group.
Anxiety disorders often emerge during this time, and understanding sleep-dependent memory processes could shed light on the mechanisms driving psychopathology. By bridging cognitive neuroscience with clinical science, the researchers aimed to explore how sleep interacts with anxiety to influence negative overgeneralization.
Methodology and Key Findings
The study involved 34 participants aged 9 to 14 years, recruited from both clinical settings and the community to capture a broad range of anxiety severity. Anxiety was assessed using a clinician-rated measure, and participants were randomly assigned to either a sleep condition or a wake condition. Everyone completed an emotional memory similarity task.
In the first phase, participants viewed 145 images—negative, neutral, and positive—and rated each one’s emotional tone. They were not told there would be a later test. After a 10- to 12-hour interval, which included overnight sleep for one group and a daytime period of wakefulness for the other, participants took a surprise recognition test. This test included exact repeats of some images, new but similar “lure” images, and entirely new images.
Among children and young adolescents who slept, higher anxiety was linked to greater generalization of negative images—that is, a stronger tendency to believe that new but similar negative pictures had been seen before. This relationship did not appear in the wake group. The three-way interplay between anxiety, emotional tone, and condition was statistically significant for negative images, but not for neutral images. Positive images showed a weaker and less consistent pattern.
Exploratory comparisons suggested that the effect was most pronounced at higher anxiety levels. Participants with high anxiety generalized negative memories substantially more after sleep than those with low anxiety. At the other end of the spectrum, participants with low anxiety sometimes generalized negative memories more after daytime wakefulness than after sleep, hinting that sleep may reduce negative generalization in less anxious individuals.
Implications and Future Directions
The key takeaway from the study is that sleep plays an active role in shaping memory and perception, particularly in emotionally vulnerable youth. Children and adolescents with higher levels of anxiety tend to overgeneralize negative experiences more after sleep compared to wakefulness, meaning they are more likely to extend negative associations to similar but non-threatening situations, which can perpetuate anxiety.
“Our findings underscore sleep’s key role in emotional memory processing during a sensitive developmental stage and point to the need for a deeper understanding of what is happening during sleep (i.e., sleep neurophysiology) in anxious youth to drive aberrant memory consolidation processes.”
These findings align with theories proposing that sleep strengthens emotional memories and extend that idea to a pattern that may be maladaptive in anxiety. The data indicate that sleep-related memory consolidation could be one pathway through which negative overgeneralization takes hold in anxious children and young adolescents. That interpretation fits with broader work suggesting that the brain extracts the “gist” of experiences during sleep and integrates that gist into existing knowledge, which can be helpful in many situations but may become problematic when negative themes become dominant.
This line of research also points toward potential clinical applications. If sleep can strengthen memory traces, it might be possible to guide that process toward more adaptive outcomes. Some experimental approaches cue specific memories during sleep to change how they are stored, and there is interest in testing whether such techniques could help reduce negative overgeneralization by reinforcing neutral or positive interpretations.
However, the study had some limitations. The sample size was relatively small, which limits the statistical power and generalizability of the findings. The researchers relied on actigraphy and sleep diaries to assess sleep, which, while ecologically valid, do not capture detailed neural processes. Additionally, circadian factors and emotional arousal were not fully controlled or directly measured, which could have influenced memory encoding and retrieval.
Future studies could examine the sleep stages and brain rhythms most closely tied to emotional memory generalization, include larger and more diverse samples, and use image sets that are matched for arousal as well as content. It would also be useful to follow children and young adolescents over time to see whether sleep-related generalization of negative memories predicts later anxiety symptoms or whether shifting sleep habits changes the tendency to generalize.
“Our long-term goal is to map how sleep-related memory mechanisms contribute to the onset and persistence of anxiety in early adolescence,” Eihentale explained. “This includes investigating specific features of sleep microarchitecture—such as slow-wave activity and spindles—that are critical for memory formation and long-term storage. By identifying when and how overgeneralization becomes maladaptive, we aim to inform targeted sleep-based interventions that can disrupt these processes early and reduce the risk of chronic anxiety disorders.”