ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Aversive memories can be weakened during human sleep via the reactivation of positive interfering memories.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Efficacy and mechanisms of repeated closed-loop auditory exposure during slow-wave sleep for internet gaming disorder.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Trial
- 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
- 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
- The cathartic dream: Using a large language model to study a new type of functional dream in healthy and clinical populations.Journal of sleep research · 2025Article
- Targeting memory of embedded positive verbal content indirectly modulates negative visual memory.iScience · 2025Article
- Optimized oxygen therapy improves sleep deprivation-induced cardiac dysfunction through gut microbiota.Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2025Article
- 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
- Modulating social learning-induced evaluation updating during human sleep.NPJ science of learning · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Recollecting painful or traumatic experiences can be deeply troubling. Sleep may offer an opportunity to reduce such suffering. We developed a procedure to weaken older aversive memories by reactivating newer positive memories during sleep. Participants viewed 48 nonsense words each paired with a unique aversive image, followed by an overnight sleep. In the next evening, participants learned associations between half of the words and additional positive images, creating interference. During the following non-rapid-eye-movement sleep, auditory memory cues were unobtrusively delivered. Upon waking, presenting cues associated with both aversive and positive images during sleep, as opposed to not presenting cues, weakened aversive memory recall while increasing positive memory intrusions. Substantiating these memory benefits, computational modeling revealed that cueing facilitated evidence accumulation toward positive affect judgments. Moreover, cue-elicited theta brain rhythms during sleep predominantly predicted the recall of positive memories. A noninvasive sleep intervention can thus modify aversive recollection and affective responses.
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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.