CAREER: Longitudinal study of the effects of baseline sleep on emotional regulation in the context of real-life stressors

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How we handle stress and process stressful experiences affects many aspects of our daily lives. A growing body of evidence suggests that sleep, particularly the sleep stage when we dream known as Rapid-Eye Movement (REM) sleep, plays a significant role in the processing of stress. In lab studies, REM sleep has been shown to alleviate stress under certain laboratory conditions and increase it in others. However, not enough is known about the way habitual, day-to-day sleep influences future stress responses, especially in real-life situations. Moreover, stress is known to affect the quality of sleep, potentially creating a vicious cycle where stress interrupts sleep which hinders the processing of stress. This project studies first responders to attempt to better understand the relationship between REM sleep, stressful events, and how well people cope with and perform under stress. In this project, critical questions about the relationship between sleep and stress are addressed through a longitudinal study, using mobile sleep monitoring devices that measure EEG signals from the brain. Physiological sleep measures from firefighters and paramedics are collected for multiple nights prior to their exposure to highly stressful real-life events as part of their routine fieldwork, as well as a year later. In addition, various behavioral and physiological measures of stress are collected on several time points during this year. These include post-traumatic stress symptoms, brain activity from relevant regions such as the amygdala and prefrontal cortex during an emotionally engaging task, and other demographic and personality traits that may modulate the effects. The researcher aims to clarify whether habitual sleep, particularly REM sleep, can predict vulnerability to stress in such real-life scenarios, what brain areas may be involved in this relationship, and what factors determine if REM sleep increases or decreases such vulnerability. The project also aims to support advancing the visibility and access to the neuroscience of sleep and cognition through a series of talks made available for the public, organizing workshops for promising student from underrepresented groups in science, and an opportunity to join the lab for hands-on experience in sleep research. Overall, this project attempts to bring sleep and stress research from the lab to the real world, thus bridging gaps in the literature and potentially establishing protocols to help future emergency responders to become less sensitive to stressful events.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.