Affective recovery from stress and its associations with sleep

Abstract

Good sleep habits are important for emotional well-being. Studies have linked sleep with people's ability to regulate their emotions in response to stressful events, yet little is known specifically about how sleep is related to a person's ability to recover affectively from a stressful experience. The current study examined self-reported sleep habits and their associations with both positive and negative affective recovery from a laboratory-induced stressor. Participants (N = 120) reported their sleep habits over the previous month and then engaged in a laboratory psychosocial stress task. Affect was measured before, during, and 6 minutes after the task. Different aspects of sleep were related to poorer positive and negative affective recovery. Worse sleep quality was associated with higher post-recovery negative affect, whereas worse sleep efficiency was associated with lower post-recovery positive affect. Findings suggest that poor sleep is associated with prolonged affective recovery from a stressful event. Implications for health and well-being are discussed.

Sleep and affect: A conceptual review

“…Cross-sectional associations between sleep quality/satisfaction and affect. The pattern of associations in the quality domain was consistent with results for the sleep disturbances domain: better sleep quality is associated with lower negative valence (long-term: [49][50][51][52][53]) and higher positive valence (short-term: [49,54,55] and long-term: [50][51][52][53]). However, when quality and negative valence were both measured at short-term timescales, we identified a possible null association [50,54,55].…”

“…The pattern of associations in the quality domain was consistent with results for the sleep disturbances domain: better sleep quality is associated with lower negative valence (long-term: [49][50][51][52][53]) and higher positive valence (short-term: [49,54,55] and long-term: [50][51][52][53]). However, when quality and negative valence were both measured at short-term timescales, we identified a possible null association [50,54,55]. This divergence from the results pertaining to the domain of sleep disturbance supports the value of considering sleep quality and sleep disturbances as separate domains.…”

“…Cross-sectional associations between sleep duration and affect. Cross-sectional associations between self-reported sleep duration and affect seemed to be non-existent or inconclusive, with possible null associations with short-term positive valence [47,50,54], and a mix of null, positive, and negative associations [37,50,54,56] with short-term negative valence.…”

“…There were not enough studies reporting SOL or WASO separately to derive any conclusions about specific sleep continuity. In the global sleep continuity domain, two of three studies reviewed [50,54,60] did not find evidence for an association between short-term self-reported continuity and negative valence, while the evidence for an association between long-term self-reported continuity and negative valence was inconclusive [49,50,61]. There were also too few studies with mismatching timescales to draw conclusions.…”

Savoring Interventions Increase Positive Emotions After a Social-Evaluative Hassle

“…We slightly altered this framework to induce stress before manipulating savoring interventions to better understand variation in positive emotion scores. In terms of the stress induction task, we used a social stressor commonly employed in emotion recovery studies ( Leger and Charles, 2020 ) and measured participants’ cardiovascular arousal using multiple types of biosensors, consistent with best practices in stress-based experimental studies ( Palumbo et al, 2017 ).…”