ArticleCurrent biology : CB2023
Updating memories of unwanted emotions during human sleep.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- Post-encoding administration of oxytocin selectively enhances memory consolidation of male faces in females.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Trial
- Circuit-informed modulation of traumatic memory in PTSD: integrating extinction, suppression, and reconsolidation.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Review
- Temporal proximity to sleep determines emotional memory interference.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Reducing PTSD symptoms through unconscious intervention.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Biased mental face representations of autistic children in the general population.Molecular autism · 2026Article
- Could sleep engineering be used to combat PTSD and depression?PLoS biology · 2026Article
- How sleeping minds decide: State-specific reconfigurations of lexical decision-making.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Targeting memory of embedded positive verbal content indirectly modulates negative visual memory.iScience · 2025Article
- Updating social evaluation during sleep.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Experimentally inducing dreams of remote emotional memory.Sleep advances : a journal of the Sleep Research Society · 2025Article
- Slow-wave sleep as a key player in offline memory processing: insights from human EEG studies.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2025Review
- Aversive memories can be weakened during human sleep via the reactivation of positive interfering memories.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Reactivating cue approached positive personality traits during sleep promotes positive self-referential processing.iScience · 2024Article
- Modulating social learning-induced evaluation updating during human sleep.NPJ science of learning · 2024Article
- Delineating memory reactivation in sleep with verbal and non-verbal retrieval cues.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- An update on recent advances in targeted memory reactivation during sleep.NPJ science of learning · 2024Review
- Overnight neuronal plasticity and adaptation to emotional distress.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2024Review
- Memory reactivation in slow wave sleep enhances relational learning in humans.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Memory updating in dreams.Sleep advances : a journal of the Sleep Research Society · 2024Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 5 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Post-learning sleep contributes to memory consolidation. Yet it remains contentious whether sleep affords opportunities to modify or update emotional memories, particularly when people would prefer to forget those memories. Here, we attempted to update memories during sleep, using spoken positive words paired with cues to recent memories of aversive events. Affective updating using positive words during human non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, compared with using neutral words instead, reduced negative affective judgments in post-sleep tests, suggesting that the recalled events were perceived as less aversive. Electroencephalogram (EEG) analyses showed that positive words modulated theta and spindle/sigma activity; specifically, to the extent that theta power was larger for the positive words than for the memory cues that followed, participants judged the memory cues less negatively. Moreover, to the extent that sigma power was larger for the positive words than for the memory cues that followed, participants forgot more episodic details about aversive events. Notably, when the onset of individual positive words coincided with the up-phase of slow oscillations (a state characterized by increased cortical excitability during NREM sleep), affective updating was more successful. In sum, we altered the affective content of memories via the strategic pairing of positive words and memory cues during sleep, linked with EEG theta power increases and the slow oscillation up-phase. These findings suggest novel possibilities for modifying unwanted memories during sleep, which would not require people to consciously confront memories that they prefer to avoid.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.