Reactivating Positive Personality Traits During Sleep Promotes Positive Self-Referential Processing

Abstract

People tend to view themselves through rose-tinted glasses, as evidenced by preferential recall of positive personality traits. We asked whether reactivating positive personality traits during sleep could enhance peoples' positive self-evaluative memories. After a baseline self-referential encoding task in which participants endorsed positive and negative traits as self-descriptive, participants were trained to give timely responses to positive traits in a cue-approach training (CAT) task. Once participants had entered slow-wave sleep during a subsequent nap, half of the trained positive traits were unobtrusively re-played to them to promote consolidation (targeted memory reactivation, TMR). Participants completed free-recall tasks about self-descriptive traits to measure their self-evaluative memories. Our findings revealed that TMR prioritized the recall of positive traits that were strongly memorized before sleep, while impairing the recall of intermediate traits. The results suggest pre-TMR self-evaluative memory strength modulated the TMR benefits. Sleep EEG analyses revealed that compared with weak/intermediate/control traits, re-playing strongly memorized traits during sleep elicited greater sigma power changes, which likely reflect preferential memory reactivation. Our results demonstrate the potential implication of wakeful cue-approach training and sleep-based memory reactivation in strengthening positive self-evaluative memories.