Sleep reactivation of positive self-evaluation reveals neural-evaluative alignment that varies with depressive symptoms

Authors:
Preprint
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Summary: Positive self-evaluation underpins resilience and mental health, yet how to enhance positive self-evaluation and the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms remain poorly understood. Existing data mostly examined self-evaluative processing of the wakeful minds, with the role of sleep remain unexplored. Here, we demonstrated that reactivation of positive self-evaluation during sleep revealed fine-grained neural-evaluative alignment that varies with depressive symptoms. We found that targeted reactivation of positive personality traits during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep enhanced positive self-evaluation, but this benefit diminished with elevated depressive symptoms. Moreover, cueing positive traits during NREM sleep elicited trait-specific, 11-16 Hz EEG sigma power-based neural representations that aligned with post-sleep positive self-evaluative representational structures, as revealed by representational similarity analyses. Notably, individuals with elevated depressive symptoms exhibited weaker neural-evaluative representational alignments, identifying a maladaptive self-evaluative processing that bridges across sleep and wakefulness states. These findings provide mechanistic insights on how fine-grained neural-evaluative alignment can substantiate positive self-evaluation, and why it was disrupted as depressive symptoms increased. Highlights: Positive-trait reactivation during NREM sleep enhances positive self-evaluation This behavioral benefit decreases as depressive symptoms increase Sleep cueing evokes trait-specific sigma-band neural representations Neural–evaluative alignment weakens as depressive symptoms increase
Funding Information
  • the Ministry of Science and Technology of China STI2030-Major Projects (No. 2022ZD0214100 to X.H., 2022ZD0211000 to Y.M.)
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 32171056 to X.H., 32125019 to Y.M.)
  • General Research Fund of Hong Kong Research Grants Council (No. 17614922 to X.H.)
  • the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2233300002 to Y.M.)

This publication has 61 references indexed in Scilit: