Sleep may amplify negative memory bias in anxious youth

New research published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry indicates that sleep may amplify the tendency for anxious children and young adolescents to overgeneralize negative experiences. In a controlled experiment, higher anxiety was linked to a greater chance of mistaking new but similar negative images for ones seen before—but only after a night’s sleep.

The study was motivated by growing evidence that sleep shapes emotional memory. During sleep, the brain tends to reactivate and consolidate recent experiences, with emotionally charged material often receiving priority over neutral content. That bias can be adaptive, helping people learn from significant events. In anxiety, however, this same machinery may tilt toward negative material, feeding what researchers call negative overgeneralization—when a memory of one unpleasant event carries over to similar, harmless situations.

Because late childhood and early adolescence are marked by heightened emotional responses, changing sleep patterns, and rising rates of anxiety, the team examined whether anxiety interacts with sleep to change how emotional memories are recognized and generalized during this period.

“Our interest was sparked by a growing recognition that sleep plays a pivotal role in cognitive processes like memory consolidation, especially during critical neurodevelopmental periods such as early adolescence,” said study author Liga Eihentale, a doctoral student at Florida International University and member of the REMEDY research group.

“Anxiety disorders often emerge during this time, and understanding sleep-dependent memory processes—such as overgeneralization—could shed light on early mechanisms driving psychopathology. By bridging cognitive neuroscience with clinical science, we aimed to explore how sleep interacts with anxiety to influence negative overgeneralization.”

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The researchers studied 34 participants between 9 and 14 years old, recruited from both clinical settings and the community to capture a broad range of anxiety severity. Anxiety was assessed with a clinician-rated measure. Participants were randomly assigned to either a sleep condition or a wake condition. Everyone completed an emotional memory similarity task. In the first phase, they viewed 145 images—negative, neutral, and positive—and rated each one’s emotional tone. They were not told there would be a later test.

After a 10- to 12-hour interval, which included overnight sleep for one group and a daytime period of wakefulness for the other, participants took a surprise recognition test. That test included exact repeats of some images, new but similar “lure” images, and entirely new images. The main outcome was how often a participant labeled a similar-but-new negative image as “old,” adjusted for any general tendency to say “old.”

Among children and young adolescents who slept, higher anxiety was linked to greater generalization of negative images—that is, a stronger tendency to believe that new but similar negative pictures had been seen before. This relationship did not appear in the wake group. The three-way interplay between anxiety, emotional tone, and condition was statistically significant for negative images, but not for neutral images. Positive images showed a weaker and less consistent pattern.

Exploratory comparisons suggested that the effect was most pronounced at higher anxiety levels. Participants with high anxiety generalized negative memories substantially more after sleep than those with low anxiety. At the other end of the spectrum, participants with low anxiety sometimes generalized negative memories more after daytime wakefulness than after sleep, which hints that sleep may reduce negative generalization in less anxious individuals.

“The key message is that sleep plays an active role in shaping memory and our perception of the world, particularly in emotionally vulnerable youth,” Eihentale told PsyPost. “Specifically, children and adolescents with higher levels of anxiety tend to overgeneralize negative experiences more after sleep compared to wakefulness, meaning they are more likely to extend negative associations to similar but non-threatening situations, which can perpetuate anxiety.”

“Our findings underscore sleep’s key role in emotional memory processing during a sensitive developmental stage and point to the need for a deeper understanding of what is happening during sleep (i.e., sleep neurophysiology) in anxious youth to drive aberrant memory consolidation processes.”

These findings align with theories proposing that sleep strengthens emotional memories and extend that idea to a pattern that may be maladaptive in anxiety. The data indicate that sleep-related memory consolidation could be one pathway through which negative overgeneralization takes hold in anxious children and young adolescents. That interpretation fits with broader work suggesting that the brain extracts the “gist” of experiences during sleep and integrates that gist into existing knowledge, which can be helpful in many situations but may become problematic when negative themes become dominant.

This line of research also points toward potential clinical applications. If sleep can strengthen memory traces, it might be possible to guide that process toward more adaptive outcomes. Some experimental approaches cue specific memories during sleep to change how they are stored, and there is interest in testing whether such techniques could help reduce negative overgeneralization by reinforcing neutral or positive interpretations. The present findings indicate that such strategies might be especially relevant for children and young adolescents who show heightened anxiety.

But anxiety severity did not meaningfully change recognition accuracy for negative images in either condition.

“We were surprised to find that anxiety severity did not interact with sleep to predict recognition accuracy of negative images,” Eihentale said. “Emotional reactivity, which is often heightened in individuals with anxiety, is typically associated with better recognition of negative memories after sleep. However, in our clinical sample, this relationship did not hold—possibly due to differences in memory processing in clinical versus non-clinical populations. Perhaps more affirming, we found that at low levels of anxiety, sleep appeared to reduce negative generalization—highlighting a potential therapeutic effect of sleep in dampening the emotional intensity of negative memories in non-anxious youth.”

The authors noted some limitations.

“Our sample size was relatively small, which limits the statistical power and generalizability of the findings,” Eihentale noted. “We also relied on actigraphy and sleep diaries to assess sleep, which, while ecologically valid, do not capture the detailed neural processes—such as slow-wave activity and sleep spindles—that are integral to memory consolidation. Additionally, circadian factors and emotional arousal were not fully controlled or directly measured, which could have influenced memory encoding and retrieval. These limitations underscore the importance of replication using larger samples and more comprehensive, multimodal assessments of sleep.”

Future studies could examine the sleep stages and brain rhythms most closely tied to emotional memory generalization, include larger and more diverse samples, and use image sets that are matched for arousal as well as content. It would also be useful to follow children and young adolescents over time to see whether sleep-related generalization of negative memories predicts later anxiety symptoms, or whether shifting sleep habits changes the tendency to generalize.

“Our long-term goal is to map how sleep-related memory mechanisms contribute to the onset and persistence of anxiety in early adolescence,” Eihentale explained. “This includes investigating specific features of sleep microarchitecture—such as slow-wave activity and spindles—that are critical for memory formation and long-term storage. By identifying when and how overgeneralization becomes maladaptive, we aim to inform targeted sleep-based interventions that can disrupt these processes early and reduce the risk of chronic anxiety disorders.”

The study, “Anxiety severity in peri-adolescents is associated with greater generalization of negative memories following a period of sleep relative to wake,” was authored by Liga Eihentale, Adam Kimbler, Nathan A. Sollenberger, Logan R. Cummings, Carlos E. Yeguez, Guadalupe C. Patriarca, Jeremy W. Pettit, Dana L. McMakin, and Aaron T. Mattfeld.