Sleep to be social: Sleep-dependent processing of social information about the self and others

• Applicants: Privatdozentin Susanne Diekelmann, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Sören Krach
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology ; Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 420599815

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

Social information is highly dynamic and complex. The capacity to navigate the social environment successfully strongly depends on the ability to reduce this complexity and abstract gist-like information from social interactions, making social information particularly well-suited for studying sleep-associated consolidation processes. In the present projects, we aimed to examine the role of sleep compared with wakefulness in the learning and abstraction of new self-related information. We used external cued reactivation during sleep to manipulate sleep-dependent abstraction processes of this material and sought to characterize the neurocomputational processes underlying social gist abstraction during sleep. Unfortunately, several planned projects, especially those involving direct social interactions, were not feasible during the COVID-19 pandemic due to repeated lockdowns and social distancing restrictions. However, we were able to implement the novel social learning task in more than six studies, involving sleep/wake comparisons, targeted memory reactivation, long-term effects of self-belief formation, computational modelling of learning processes, functional magnetic resonance imaging, pupil data, and translation into a clinical sample. While participants displayed a negativity bias during learning, which was associated with affective states, pupil dilation, and neural activity within the anterior insula, amygdala, ventral tegmental area/substantia nigra, and mPFC, we found that higher overall sleep time correlated with more positive updating. In a clinical study, although without direct sleep manipulation, we found that a higher symptom burden was associated with forming more negative self-beliefs and more positive beliefs about others. This bias was driven by reduced learning from positive prediction errors in depression. Overall, we successfully implemented the task design into a sleep/wake context and established routines to use the learning task in a neuroimaging environment, also with the potential to examine patients with clinical diagnoses. Our studies continue, now in part funded by our own budget, and we are optimistic to reach our goals within the next years.

Publications

• Building the Bridge: Outlining Steps Toward an Applied Sleep-and-Memory Research Program. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29(6), 554–562.
  Feld, Gordon B. & Diekelmann, Susanne
  
• Selective suppression of rapid eye movement sleep increases next-day negative affect and amygdala responses to social exclusion. Scientific Reports, 10(1).
  Glosemeyer, Robert W.; Diekelmann, Susanne; Cassel, Werner; Kesper, Karl; Koehler, Ulrich; Westermann, Stefan; Steffen, Armin; Borgwardt, Stefan; Wilhelm, Ines; Müller-Pinzler, Laura; Paulus, Frieder M.; Krach, Sören & Stolz, David S.
  
• Self-beneficial belief updating as a coping mechanism for stress-induced negative affect. Scientific Reports, 11(1).
  Czekalla, Nora; Stierand, Janine; Stolz, David S.; Mayer, Annalina V.; Voges, Johanna F.; Rademacher, Lena; Paulus, Frieder M.; Krach, Sören & Müller-Pinzler, Laura
  
• Neurocomputational mechanisms of affected beliefs. Communications Biology, 5(1).
  Müller-Pinzler, Laura; Czekalla, Nora; Mayer, Annalina V.; Schröder, Alexander; Stolz, David S.; Paulus, Frieder M. & Krach, Sören
  
• The (un)learning of social functions and its significance for mental health. Clinical Psychology Review, 98, 102204.
  Flechsenhar, Aleya; Kanske, Philipp; Krach, Sören; Korn, Christoph & Bertsch, Katja
  
• Optimizing the methodology of human sleep and memory research. Nature Reviews Psychology, 3(2), 123-137.
  Németh, Dezső; Gerbier, Emilie; Born, Jan; Rickard, Timothy; Diekelmann, Susanne; Fogel, Stuart; Genzel, Lisa; Prehn-Kristensen, Alexander; Payne, Jessica; Dresler, Martin; Simor, Peter; Mazza, Stephanie; Hoedlmoser, Kerstin; Ruby, Perrine; Spencer, Rebecca M. C.; Albouy, Genevieve; Vékony, Teodóra; Schabus, Manuel & Janacsek, Karolina
  
• The effects of sleep and targeted memory reactivation on the consolidation of relevant and irrelevant information. Frontiers in Sleep, 2.
  Barner, Christine; Werner, Ann-Sophie; Schörk, Sandra; Born, Jan & Diekelmann, Susanne
  
• Aberrant insula activity to negative and reduced learning from positive prediction errors as mechanisms underlying maladaptive self-belief formation in depression.
  Czekalla, Nora; Schröder, Alexander; Mayer, Annalina V.; Stierand, Janine; Stolz, David S.; Kube, Tobias; Korn, Christoph W.; Wilhelm-Groch, Ines; Klein, Jan Philipp; Paulus, Frieder M.; Krach, Sören & Müller-Pinzler, Laura
  
• Self-belief formation. Center for Open Science.
  Krach, Sören; Müller-Pinzler, Laura; Czekalla, Nora; Schröder, Alexander; Wilhelm-Groch, Ines; Luebber, Finn; Rademacher, Lena; Stolz, David; Paulus, Frieder Michel & Mayer, Annalina V.
  
• The Human Affectome. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 158, 105450.
  Schiller, Daniela; Yu, Alessandra N.C.; Alia-Klein, Nelly; Becker, Susanne; Cromwell, Howard C.; Dolcos, Florin; Eslinger, Paul J.; Frewen, Paul; Kemp, Andrew H.; Pace-Schott, Edward F.; Raber, Jacob; Silton, Rebecca L.; Stefanova, Elka; Williams, Justin H.G.; Abe, Nobuhito; Aghajani, Moji; Albrecht, Franziska; Alexander, Rebecca; Anders, Silke ... & Lowe, Leroy