Department of Biological Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium.
Emotion. 2012 Dec;12(6):1415-21. doi: 10.1037/a0028501. Epub 2012 Jul 9.
Despite a long history of interest in emotion regulation as well as in the mechanisms that regulate sleep, the relationship between emotion regulation and sleep is not yet well understood. The present study investigated whether "an experiential approach"-defined by coping through affectively acknowledging, understanding, and expressing actual emotional experience and affective feeling about a situation-compared with a "cognitive analytical approach"-defined by the cognitive analysis of the causes, meanings and implications of the situation for the own self-would buffer the impact of an emotional failure experience on (1) emotional experience and (2) sleep structure assessed by EEG polysomnography. Twenty-eight healthy volunteers participated in this study. A direct comparison of the two emotion regulation strategies revealed that participants who were instructed to apply an experiential approach showed less fragmentation of sleep than participants who were instructed to apply an analytical approach. The use of an experiential approach resulted in a longer sleep time, higher sleep efficiency, fewer awakenings, less % time awake, and fewer minutes wake after sleep onset. Implications of the differential effects of these two forms of emotion regulation on sleep are discussed.
尽管人们对情绪调节以及调节睡眠的机制一直很感兴趣，但情绪调节和睡眠之间的关系仍未得到很好的理解。本研究探讨了“体验式方法”——通过情感上承认、理解和表达实际的情绪体验以及对情境的情感感受来应对——与“认知分析方法”——通过对情境的原因、意义和对自我的影响进行认知分析来应对——是否会缓冲情绪失败体验对（1）情绪体验和（2）通过 EEG 多导睡眠图评估的睡眠结构的影响。28 名健康志愿者参加了这项研究。对这两种情绪调节策略的直接比较表明，与接受分析方法指导的参与者相比，接受体验方法指导的参与者的睡眠碎片化程度较低。使用体验式方法可导致睡眠时间更长、睡眠效率更高、觉醒次数更少、清醒时间百分比更少、入睡后醒来的分钟数更少。讨论了这两种形式的情绪调节对睡眠的不同影响的意义。
