UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO
Department of Psychiatry
Fifth Annual Research Forum – Extravaganza 2014
POSTER TITLE
Brain mapping the link between sleep and the neural correlates of emotion
regulation in anxiety and depression
DISEASE/KEY
WORDS:
sleep duration, onset latency, sleep efficiency, actigraphy, brain imaging, anxiety,
depression
AUTHORS:
Julia Roberts, Leah Rubin, Rachel H. Jacobs, Olusola Ajilore, Amy West, Daniel A.
Fitzgerald, Sheila D’Sa, Amy Kennedy, K. Luan Phan, Heide Klumpp
MENTEE
CATEGORY:
Research Assistant/Student
BACKGROUND:
Sleep problems negatively impact mood and are prevalent in individuals suffering
from psychiatric illness. However, sleep quality is commonly assessed through selfreport, which may be inaccurate. Actigraph is a watch-like device endorsed method
by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine for assessing objective sleep patterns
outside laboratory settings. As part of an on-going study, we are testing the
feasibility of acquiring actigraph measures in individuals with anxiety, depression, or
who are at risk for depression in the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Research Program,
UI Center on Depression and Resilience, Women’s Mental Health Program, and
Pediatric Brain Research and Intervention Center. In the context of this larger study,
we examined the relationship between sleep and neural correlates of emotion
regulation as poor sleep is thought to disrupt circuitry involved in regulation. Based
on earlier pilot data, we predicted objective sleep measures would not correlate with
subjective measures of sleep. Consequently, we hypothesized brain response related
to objective sleep would differ from that associated with subjective sleep quality.
METHODS:
Across laboratories, actigraph measures were obtained from 133 patients ranging in
age from 8 to 60 years. A subgroup of patients (n=26) with internalizing disorders
(e.g., Social Anxiety Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Major Depressive
Disorder) (31% male, 69% female) ranging in age from 19 to 47 years completed
actigraph and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, a commonly used sleep
questionnaire, within a week of undergoing a validated emotion regulation task
during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Regulation involved the
instruction to reappraise (e.g., reinterpret) a negative image to reduce the intensity
of negative emotion evoked by the image. Regulation was contrasted with simply
looking at neutral stimuli (“Look” condition) or experiencing the emotional state
elicited by a negative image (e.g., Maintain condition). Indices of sleep quality were
“duration,” the amount of sleep obtained per night; “onset latency,” the amount of
time it takes one to fall asleep after laying down; and “efficiency,” the percent of
time sleeping while in bed.
RESEARCH MENTOR:
Heide Klumpp
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO
Department of Psychiatry
RESULTS:
CONCLUSIONS:
As predicted there was no relationship between objective and subject measures
regarding sleep efficiency (r=0.08, p=0.72), onset latency (r= -0.12, p=0.55), or
duration though there was a trend (r= 0.37, p=0.06). As hypothesized, neural
response patterns during emotion regulation differed between objective and
subjective indices of sleep quality. For example, for Reappraise vs. Look, objective
sleep efficiency was associated with greater limbic activation (i.e., insula) whereas
self-reported efficiency corresponded with enhanced prefrontal engagement (e.g.,
anterior cingulate cortex).
These findings suggest the importance of obtaining both objective and subject sleep
measures in a patient population. These measures were not correlated with each
other indicating they provide us with very different, and possibly useful, information
about patient’s sleep. For example, self-reported sleep problems may reflect a bias
that could be a therapeutic target of treatment. Additionally, preliminary data
indicating brain response during emotion regulation tracks objective and subjective
sleep differently suggests interpretation of sleep quality is observed at the neural
level. Future work includes examining the extent to which neural patterns of
activation during regulation are common or distinct in different cohorts of patients
and healthy controls across the developmental spectrum.