Examining the Emotional Memory Tradeoff Effect in Young and Middle-Aged Adults

Sleep is a unique process that is beneficial for the consolidation of emotional memory. More than this, sleep selectively enhances memory for emotional components at the expense of neutral components, earning the name emotional memory tradeoffs, and these findings have been replicated among healthy young adults. However, it still remains unclear how disrupted sleep, typically evident in depression and in aging, might alter the existence of these sleep enhancing effects toward emotional memory. To address these gaps within the literature, the present study compared emotional memory consolidation after a period of active wakefulness and full night of sleep in young and middle-aged adults in an online study. The results indicated that there were no statistically significant differences among younger adults in memory consolidation for sleep compared to wake, no significant relationship between depressive symptomatology and emotional memory, nor interaction between poor sleep quality, high depressive symptomatology and the tradeoff. However, when looking at both young and middle aged adults, sleep enhanced emotional memory tradeoffs compared to wake while also not showing any significant relationship with age and depression on the tradeoff. Although these findings suggest sleep may affect emotional memory consolidation regardless of age, more research is necessary to understand how poor sleep and depression mutually and exclusively contribute to emotional memory consolidation.